Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  “To rejoice with them would be easy, but it would not be right. For the thing was a cruel blow to the pride of their families. To this day, the Dudleys are as close as oysters about it. Ask Lord Dudley about it, and he will pretend no knowledge of it. Persist, and he will send for a policeman—” she dissolved into a gentle giggling.

  “Well, it is a tale with a happy ending!” said Arnold; and they halted and looked up at the trees. “I would like to be a tree in your garden; and never make a fool of myself or get into mischief again,”

  “You will not be a tree in my garden,” said Harriet, “but you will never make a fool of yourself or get into mischief. And now I have told you a fairy tale, and you must go home. Truly, it is time.”

  “I will not be able to go home at all,” he told her, “unless you let me first walk with you three times up and three times down your long fine lawn. Do you know, Harriet, I have never been so sorry to leave anybody in my life, since I was a little boy and used to go to spend the afternoon with my old uncle who had been a soldier and fought with Roberts at Kandahar, and I would kick and scream and blubber when my mother came after tea to end our talks of bloodshed and rifles and Ashantis. You are as dear to me as if I had known you all my life, which I have not, and as exciting as if I had seen you for the first time this afternoon, which I have not either.”

  Harriet squeezed his arm; and without saying a word to each other, but in very comfortable communion, they paced the lawn as he had desired. Evening, when she had begun her story, had rested upon the scene as bloom on the grape, but it had now assumed a more dominating part. The sky had been bleached of its daylight blue, and though it had not yet been invaded by the dark tone of night its translucent pallor was pricked here and there by a star to show that this would not be long delayed. In the garden each colour was yielding up its essence to the darkness. The upward-looking faces of the flowers were merely pale, and so too were the downward-looking faces of the leaves on the trees. The soil in the beds and the tree-trunks were merely night-coloured; and the lawn they trod showed that if grass had a ghost it would be the same greyish hue as, it is commonly accepted, are the ghosts of men. From each of Harriet’s windows leaned forth darkness, which held wide the gaping doors at the top of her blanched stone steps; and in the main wing of the house, though now a line of golden lights winked all the length of its ground floor, the same inhabitant looked forth from the windows of the upper storey in the shadow of the colossal pediment.

  Suddenly Arnold Condorex burst out laughing. “Do you know,” he said, “that when you were telling that story I found myself believing it were true?”

  “Do you know for certain it is not?” smiled Harriet. “I am glad it entertained you. Indeed, our time together has been very satisfactory, even to the very end. For are you not enjoying now a very pleasant sadness? I do not know anything more delightful than to be sad at this time of day.” She uttered an ejaculation of pleasure as from the line of golden lights there came the sound of music. “Exquisite! A waltz! And an indifferent one! My heart will presently melt.”

  “Music? Do the inhabitants of Kensington then play bridge in time to music?” enquired Arnold.

  “Oh, there is much done there other than bridge,” explained Harriet, showing signs of local patriotism, “and it is by no means attended by the inhabitants of Kensington alone. I hear the Blennerhassett is surpassed only by the Embassy as a magnet for fashion.”

  “What!” exclaimed Arnold, coming to a standstill “Is that the Blennerhassett?”

  “Does it surprise you so much,” she rallied him, “that a club which has its home in Blennerhassett House should be called the Blennerhassett?”

  “It should not, certainly,” he admitted with a laugh, “but I have heard so often of the Blennerhassett, though I have never seen it, since I am as yet,” he said with some moodiness, his eyes resting on the golden lights, “the companion of the nobility only in their labours, not in their pleasures. And when one thinks of a focus of such pleasures, one does not think of it as adjoining one of one’s own quiet haunts.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Does one not?” she said wistfully; and continued, as if to console him, “But to-night, however, the most elegant will not be there. What, have I confused you so that you have forgotten the day of the week? This is Saturday. The truly popular are now at varying distances from London: to take their situation at its most favourable; in the panelled bedrooms of great houses. Here there are only those who, happy enough in being born within the palisades of society, have not that further happiness of having been in any way blessed at birth. The females of this breed were begotten by fathers who do but smirk the chubbier when they find on the breakfast-table a letter from their bank managers, so certainly it is to report increase; and their mothers are knots in a far-flung net of creditable cousinships. But they are not beautiful enough, or they are more than plump enough, or their dancing is too gross a contradiction of the motion of the spheres, or their bridge is but a stumbling-block in the path of their neighbours. So at the moment they bear down on us, not radiant, but not disconsolate, for they have companions, albeit those are the males of their own sort…”

  Speech dried on her lips. Her natural guardian angel, her own grace, forsook her suddenly. She staggered, tripped on a minute inequality, and would have fallen to the ground, had he not caught her in his arms. From the dead weight her almost weightless body had assumed, from the blue shadows that lay on her closed eyelids and round her lips, which remained parted as in horror, he perceived that some monstrous blow had felled her. But what the blow was, or who had struck it, he did not guess until she looked up into his face, and shuddered, and cast away his arms. Then he remembered, and understood.

  She stood for a moment apart from him, rubbing her hands as if to wash away his touch and keeping her face away from him; then made an obvious effort to still her bosom, and turned back to him, offering to slip her arm in his with a kindliness that half his lost and miserable spirit hailed as the damned might hail a draught of water, while half of it tried to think of it meanly, as smugness, vanity, and joy at having put him in the wrong.

  “You must make one more promenade with me,” she said, giving him a pallid smile, “for you promised yourself six journeys about the lawn, and you have made but five. Come!” and gently she forced her arm in his.

  Poor Harriet’s house looked dreary as they walked. That was no wonder; for in the brief striking-match time it takes to think a thought there had been broomed out of its doors and windows a great deal of prettiness and happiness that till then had appeared to be part of its fittings. Till then it had seemed certain that there would never be need for Harriet to sit in darkness, since there were inscribed on the air of her apartment scenes which, shadows of memory though they must be, were so bright in their subject that they were as good as a couple of chandeliers. There had been that first time she had looked up from her piano and seen him standing outside the French windows at the top of the stone steps, holding a bouquet of roses he had purchased at the shop round the corner (he had wished to buy it from some more magnificent florist’s but did not know the etiquette of transportation) and looking sullen, because he dared not stare into the room and he was mortally afraid lest she should be closeted with some person of more consequence than himself. She had flipped at three joyous notes in the treble before she ran to open to him. There had been the moment when she had come downstairs after half an hour spent in making ten moons of her nails, and discovered him sitting at his ease by her hearth, toying with the long gloves which she had left on her piano. She had chided him for coming in with neither knock nor ring, and for laying his rough paws on the fine leather; but he had drawled that he would observe no ceremony with one who lived like a gipsy, half in her garden, and that she was a sloven to leave her gloves about, and a deceiver to call them gloves, since it was notorious that in Kensington there was a race of gazelles with a snake-like habit of casting their skins at certain seasons of
year, and one such had in this room cast the covering of its fleet fore-ankles. “Ay!” he had said, and held up the strips of leather against the light. She had glowed to perceive that he was taking pleasure in little things about her even as she took pleasure in little things about him, such as the contrast at that very moment between the affected insolence of his lip and the shining brotherliness of his eye. That had been a good moment, and there had been better this very afternoon; but she could not recall those without the certainty of tears.

  So she surely had been justified, poor Harriet, in thinking that at any time when her fire would not draw, when the fairy of the switch would not obey, she would have warmth, she would have light, simply by filling the air with these shapes that had once so glowingly occupied it. Alas! It would never be so now. What woman can bear to recall the most flattering moment of a love affair in which, time has revealed, she did but play the part of a maid who is kissed only because the mistress is not yet ready for the suitor? And there had been that in Arnold Condorex’s thought which offended against the order of nature, as it is comprehended by the hearts of females, almost as soon as they are aware that there is a different class of beings who wear blue bows upon their cot-covers instead of pink. From that beginning they know well that it is natural and just as the supersession of the spring by summer, that the less beautiful should be abandoned for the more beautiful. It is no good deploring it, nor, indeed, is it worth deploring. For spring dies, summer dies, autumn dies, winter dies, the year is gone, another is come; for youth passes, ripeness passes, age passes, a generation’s gone, another is come. All is ended in a general levelling. So secretly, whatever they may say aloud, they think a deserted wife who weeps a loss springing from the eclipse of her charms to be a fool who kicks against the pricks. But when they come across the reverse of the process and see a man leaving a beautiful woman for one less beautiful, not because his sight is deranged by love but because he thereby gains an end, then they feel such disgust as is excited in our males by the horrid habits of the Bulgars. Not thus is nature’s way. The skin, than which nothing is more loyal to nature, rises in gooseflesh.

  She had felt therefore a general horror, as well as a personal anguish, when, his cold eyes turned towards the lights and music of the club, he wondered how soon he might chance on some undesired woman as she was describing, who could be quickly got and would be a stairway to better things. The plain daughter of a Privy Councillor had been his thought, which had expanded into a consideration of what ways he might use, did he meet such a dowd at Lady Derrydown’s tea on Thursday (for one never knows), to enjoy Harriet till the last safe moment and then disembarrass himself of her. No, she would never now be able to warm and light her rooms by recalling how they had been tender to each other.

  They had completed the first part of their promenade and had now turned their backs on the dark house, but it was no more pleasant walking this way than the other. She had to cast her eyes down on the ground so that she did not have to look at the three trees which she had named the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley, for now she could not bear to think that she had told him a fairy tale. It is the special hardship of women that it is their destiny to make gifts, and that the quality of their giving is decided by the quality shown by those who do the taking. No matter how full their hearts may be of tenderness and generosity as they hold out their gifts, if the takers snatch it without gratitude, then the givers count as neither tender nor generous, but merely easy. Indeed Harriet had not meant to be easy, but she was not fool enough to refuse to see that this evening had proved her so; and she felt that the proof lay more in her having put herself about to entertain him with a piece of fancy than in her having made certain other disclosures which might have seemed more important.

  She bit her lip; and beside her Arnold Condorex’s mind growled that she was not being fair to him. No man on earth would ever surpass him in appreciation of her peculiar quality; would more ecstatically know her bland as a runnel of cream from the lip of a jug, and at the same time so wild and ethereal that she could not be the product of the tame human womb, but must have been begotten by a god in a wind-tost grove, and then again so primly perfect that she could not be the product of the crude human womb, but must have been worked by the finicking human hand, like fine needlework or old silver. No man on earth to whom she made benevolent concessions would in his soul more immediately have doffed his hat and gone down on his knees, sensible that he was in a church. But a man must rise in the world! Dear God, did she not understand? A man must rise in the world! Despair swept through him as he realised that certainly she would not understand; and it became absolute as he realised that neither did he truly understand it himself. He would have been far better pleased had it been his intention to stay faithfully with his Harriet till some force that could be honoured parted them, rather than to betray her for a Privy Councillor’s plain daughter, whom for some reason he now saw as a large and raw-boned English sheep-dog.

  Yet the latter intention was unalterably a part of himself. He could no more remove it than he could uproot his own breath. Why should he be so welded with a programme which, in thinking on it, he felt he did not in the least relish? Could he veritably care so much about the duty to rise in the world if he was capable of such hearty longing to act counter to it? But with a groan he realised that he cared for nothing else. It dominated him, he was its instrument. There might have been a vast superior spirit which had invested him and was so much greater than himself that its loins sprung from his shoulders, and it used his whole body as legs to carry it about on its business of rising in the world. Yet even if that were so, must he lose Harriet? Could he not keep her with a lie? But, great gods, now she had this power, he could not lie to her. Nay, at this very moment, she must know that he was debating whether or not he might successfully lie to her!

  Looking from side to side in his distress, he noticed that they were at that instant passing the door in the wall, and he most heartily wished he might wring her hand in perfunctory farewell and dash for it, leaving for ever this garden that had become accursed. But he had left his hat and stick on the sofa; and it was a presentation stick. The trouble of getting it must be accomplished first.

  “I will fetch them for you,” said Harriet, and started towards the door.

  He said, “Let me!” But over her shoulder she gave him a smile that was not unkind, and yet was proud enough to forbid him to persist. No, indeed, he could not thrust himself again into the rooms he had desecrated. He watched the pale figure pass through the settling twilight, and perceived that she was carrying herself with the straightness of those who feel themselves utterly bowed down; and he covered his face with his hands.

  When he could bear to bring them down again she was standing in front of him, his hat and stick dark against the pallor of her gown. She laughed tenderly, as if she had found him playing a game familiar to them both, and murmured, “My love, you must go now.” To judge from her bearing all might have been well between them.

  “My love, I must go now,” he echoed hoarsely. They looked long at one another. It struck him that they were exchanging glances of more agonised sincerity, more desperately truthful reference to their mutual regard, than they would have shared had they been parting as true lovers. Could not something be done with all this honesty, with all this acute sense of each other’s being? “Oh, Harriet!” he cried. “Can we not—? May we not—?”