by Rebecca West
She grew very still. Her head drooped, so that through the more than dusk he could not see her face at all. A bird sped across the sky above them, croaking some monstrous tale of avian disaster, but she did not look up at it. A freshet of wind stirred her skirts, but she did not smooth them. It might have been that she had died on her feet and was being upheld in air by friendly sprits till one came who had loved her most, and had the right to lay her on her bier. And indeed, as Arnold Condorex well knew, she was telling him that, so far as being his loving mistress was concerned, she was dead.
“Ah, well!” he sighed. “So must it be!” He put out his hand and took hers, and raised it towards his lips, and said solemnly, seeking her eyes through the darkness: “May God bless you and keep you wherever you may go, for being so kind to me this day.”
She answered him in his own words: “May God bless you and keep you, wherever you may go, for being so kind to me this day,” and raised her mouth to his.
They were as a Greek vase, he the sturdy vessel, she the scroll of ornament wound round him. But that vase was shattered an instant after its making, when he broke away from her inquisitorially, to know if, when the music changed in the damnable club beyond the wrought-iron gates, he had wondered whether he danced well enough to acquit himself to the pleasure of the Privy Councillor’s plain daughter or should take lessons. Had he not wondered that? It seemed as if he had not, for her face was smooth as junket in its bowl. He had not thought it then, but, by God, he was about to think it now! He cried out, “I must leave this place!” and turned blindly towards the door in the wall. It did not in the least assuage him that she sped beside him, guiding his blindness, finding the latch for him. For he felt his intention to rise in the world like lead in his bosom, and he knew she must know it was there, and must know that if he stayed another instant he would be snarling at her in his soul, blaming her meanly and unjustly for this clairvoyant power, though well aware that she had come by it through pure accident, and had lost as much by it as him. Was there no end to the nastiness in his brain-pan?
Now he was out on the pavement. From the darkness behind him she cried gaily, “Fare you well, and mind you are not late for his lordship,” and slammed the door. He leaned against the wall, drew out his handkerchief, and passed it over his brow, which was wet with sweat; and stood awhile and groaned. What an end of a gallant adventure! Was it possible that he could be really a good secretary? And had her voice not broken on the last few words?
His brow was not indeed truly dry until a later hour that night, when the unusually affable greetings of Lord Derrydown made him conscious that he was confronted with one of those occasions when, by being useful to the great, we can advance nearer to that blessed time when they are useless to us and can be scorned. He became himself again. Assuming the meek and serviceable aspect of a retriever, he listened while Lord Derrydown informed him that that evening a crisis had arisen in high places which he, and he alone, could bring to a happy conclusion. It was, of course, known to all that a tour of our Eastern possessions was about to be performed by a certain personage of high rank, whose mind enjoyed the pellucidity of an ideal Italian sky. Not enough matter was ever present in it to mar that dazzling vacuity by a single cloud; and while this state of affairs made persons who sat next him at banquets invariably describe him as delightfully simple and unaffected, it created a less favourable effect when it was revealed in the course of oratory. It was, in fact, a case where a competent secretary was not only desirable but indispensable; and one such had long since been engaged. But at the last moment—it was horrible to think how near the time of embarkation—the worst had been discovered concerning his habits.
His habits, repeated Lord Derrydown, and he drooped his blue and wrinkled eyelids to show shame and horror. Arnold Condorex did the like with his, thinking without mercy, “The old fool looks like one of those sheep’s skulls that one finds lying on the downs.” His lowered gaze fell on the dispatch-box that was relique of this master’s tenure of the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, and he knew a spasm of desire as urgent as any he had ever felt for a woman. “God, had I but family behind me!” came from his breast as if a harp-string had twanged there; and was followed by a richer and more swelling note. “But listen! That has begun which promises you shall do very well in spite of your low birth!” Barely could he control himself sufficiently to go through the proper motions of raising his eyebrows in surprise, and of rolling his pupils from side to side in modesty, as Lord Derrydown went on to explain that when the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State had consulted him as to how they might best fill the sudden vacancy, he had named, and had been conscious of extreme self-sacrifice when he did so, his own secretary as a person of sterling ability and no habits, no habits at all. His heart cried out in rapture, “The old fool has offered me to the Prime Minister as a bribe to cozen him to do the Archbishop of Canterbury’s will and wreck the Bill for permitting a man to marry his grand-dame by an amendment that it will apply only if she be of crooked stature and swarthy and there be no likelihood of pleasure in it. I am right, then, about my own quality!” Scarcely could he knit his brows, protrude his lower lip, bury his chin on his chest, and make the other adjustments of his countenance necessary for his impersonation of a devoted servant downcast because his master (to whom, God knows, he would deny nothing if he could but choose) had asked a service almost impossible for him to perform; so high was his soul soaring, and so loud was it singing, “I am rising in the world! I am rising in the world!”
Then a misgiving came on him. It was as if one, sitting in a fine room he had lately furnished and preening himself because all was well and all was paid for, should see between two of the floor boards a dark pool trickling. Where had he been infected with this monstrous doubt that rising in the world was not the supreme good? Why, that very night, along with some other very disagreeable happenings, in the garden of Harriet Hume whom now he need not see again. “In two days! Sail in two days!” he exclaimed, echoing the old fool’s words. But prudence alone made him speak as if he were appalled; for if a man must buy his outfit for the East and do much other official business in two days, then fitly he may say good-bye to a lady, with whom in any case he has exchanged no serious vows, by telephone.
Yet that was not how he said good-bye to her, though, God knows, that was how he tried to do it. Panic prevented him. For several times the next morning he gave her number to the dark capricious instrument, but it became no channel for the sirop of her voice and continued to make its own animal noises. On the fifth occasion he said to himself, “This is strange, for at this hour she is usually at her piano,” and then the sweat stood on his forehead as it had done the evening before, when he went from her gate. During the night his will, having no fancy for what had happened on the previous day in Harriet’s garden, had been busy unpicking the stitches which sewed together his recollections, and had left them in loose pieces round his brain; but now they seemed bent on putting themselves together in the same abhorred shape. For was it not that Harriet was able to tell through her new clairvoyant powers that it was he who caused her telephone to make its angry pheasant-whirr; and for that reason was now sitting still upon her stool, her hands suspended above the keys of the piano, her mouth trembling as she wished that he who had ruined her peace yesternight would leave her quiet to-day? He groaned; and immediately knew himself a fool. For calm fell on the growling in the ebonite, and little Harriet said “Halloa” as cheerful as a sparrow. Oh, he had dreamt all this about clairvoyance. She gave a great many “Ohs” and “Ahs” to his great news, and seemed to understand most amiably that he had no time to pay a farewell visit to her, and tittered very prettily when he spoke of the previous afternoon. “All’s well that ends well!” said he, putting down the instrument and sitting back in his chair.
But had it ended well? He started forward because a dread had pinched him that all was very ill, that he had veritably witnessed a suspension of the proper orde
r of nature, and that he had trodden a flower to the ground very brutally because of it. For had she not answered the telephone only because her sight into his thoughts had told her he was suspecting why she did not answer it? He snatched up the instrument and again gave it her number; and the instant after he and she knew that most abstract form of confrontation which happens when two people stand with receivers to ear and transmitters to mouth but do not speak. “If my dream be true and no phrensy,” he thought wildly, and with cunning, “she will say ‘Yes, you may come to tea to-day’ before I have asked it of her,” but there was silence broken only by such a faint noise as a mouse might make, not knowing what to do, until it struck him that she knew he was putting her to this test and was at her wits’ end to guess what was wisest, When he rapped out his request aloud he had a frightful sense that he was making it a second time, and that she acceded with the patness of one who has thought a question over.
Yet surely his dream was phrensy. When he came down to Blennerhassett House that afternoon with a stack of roses from a truly magnificent florist (he had begun to spend his money with the recklessness of one about to make a great fortune or to die) he found Harriet very pretty, and a trifle silly, and as comfortable a companion as one could wish. Prattling not too intelligently about India and elephants and Nabobs’ jewels, she fiddled about her garden cutting lavender-flowers till the basket she had slung on her forearm was full, and then fluttered indoors to put them on her windowsills to dry; and then she sat behind her silver equipage and gave him very good home-made scones and country butter, and giggled a great deal. Looking on the suavity of her face and the meek pliancy of her form and manners, which were such that if one found her in one’s way one might surely pick her up and loop her round a hook on the door without encountering physical or mental resistance, he said to himself, “It must be that the other night my intellects were disordered. Certainly there is as little sinister in my Harriet here as there is in drinking sugared tea out of a pretty cup. She could not read my thoughts. I doubt if she could read her primer.” But something tender in him, that same part which had before the mirror designed to buy her a little ring for her little hand, rebuked him. “Whatever happened last night, whether it was magic or the dropping of an ill-considered word, you betrayed to her that no woman is as much to you as the prospect of rising in the world, and you betrayed it in an ugly hour, and in a roughish shape. Decidedly you have brought no good fortune to the girl. For only yesterday she was as kind to you as may be, and to-day you tell her you must immediately sail for the Indies. You cannot say that you have treated her handsomely.” At that he could not help but fall a-moping.
Just then Harriet, smiling like a doll, raised her hand to her head and withdrew the sole pin that held in place her Grecian knot; and the sleek serpents of her hair slipped down over her shoulders and covered her bosom, their curled heads lying in her lap. In but one neat, fluent movement she again compressed its fineness and impaled it; but not before he had called himself a fool for thinking that the loss of a lover could mean much to any creature so rich in all the most seductive attributes of her sex. With an easy conscience, therefore, he rose to his feet and bade her good-bye; and remained in a state of cheerfulness until, when he was re-entering his flat in the Temple, his hand left the latch-key sticking in the lock while his chin sank on his breast and he stood staring very stupidly at the door. It had occurred to him that if she had read his compunction for leaving her so soon and so abruptly she could not have devised a prettier and kinder way of relieving his mind. Yet of that action, though it drearily assumed in his mind an air of complete probability, he thought not as one usually thinks of pretty and kind things. When, once across his threshold, he vehemently slammed the door, the vehemence was because he imagined himself slamming it on the prodigiousness of Harriet Hume.
II
NOT till six years afterwards did Arnold Condorex see Harriet Hume again. It was nearly otherwise, for within two years from their parting his footsteps were led to the door in the wall of Blennerhassett House, and it was sheer singularity, of a kind that he blushed to remember, that forbade him entering it. ’Twas at the time when the Powers were revising certain matters to do with Asian frontiers under the eye of Geneva; not the least of which matters was that eternal source of discussions, that litter of cockatrices, the Mangostan Treaty. It had annoyed Mr. Gladstone in 1878; and it annoyed the Secretary of State for India in our day not less, perhaps even more, because at least Mr. Gladstone appears (from his speeches) to have known what or where Mondh was. Mysterious Mondh! How came it that it was the very pivot and keystone of that monstrous Treaty which casts a longer shadow across Asia than Mount Everest, yet was not marked on any map nor present in the narrative of any traveller? Such was the question that the India Office was gloomily addressing to its own bosom. It might have seemed more profitable to address it to the bosom of a Mango, but that was purely a theoretical possibility. For the sake of the British Raj no white man must ever admit to a Mango that he does not know everything. Once the secret were to leak out, the insolence of the Mangoes at present studying law and mathematics in this country would become unbridled, and there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Middle Temple Hall and Cambridge; and from Mangostan disloyal expeditions would set out for Moscow, which certainly would not be able to do anything with them, but ought not to be encouraged even by that much. For these reasons it caused inexpressible joy in the India Office when it was credibly reported that a certain general on the retired list of the India Army had been heard, during his last visit to the Oriental Club in 1912, to say that he had once spent a month in Mondh; and that he was still living and resident in South Kensington. Immediately the Secretary of State for India had summoned Arnold Condorex (who was by now an expert in Far Eastern affairs and had been transferred to the India Office with such a magnificent transcendence of normal processes as took Elijah up to Heaven) and bade him to hasten to pluck the secret from the old man’s mouth.
It was on his return from his errand that he found himself at Harriet’s door. By then it was the burning afternoon of a dog-day; the shadows on the pavement were blue as water. Yet he had thought he would walk a part of the way home, just the length of a few squares and crescents. For the general’s house had been a sealed cube of age. The butler who had opened the door had looked past Condorex with as much suspicion as his enrheumed eyes could hold, at a knife-grinding machine that happened to be standing in the road; for he himself had witnessed the quarrel between the knife grinder and the Friend of Man that Canning writes of, and he felt too frail to deal with anything like that nowadays. The general’s daughter blushed and turned away her face as she passed him on the stairs, so long was it since any human being outside these walls, save only Debrett and Burke, had known of her existence; and he knew she had this very day formed a dreadful resolution that if nothing happened in the next thirty years she would dress herself all in white and fling herself from the Italianate tower which gave a romantic finish to the villa. The general himself lay frog-cold in a room as hot as a Turkish bath, and was not truly alive, but caught in the hinge of the door between life and death, and groaned as it swung to and fro and let others in and out, but never him. After being in such a house it seemed good to move one’s limbs and sweat, and also Arnold wished to walk that he might think, and even talk aloud, if he wanted to do so. For he had a matter to settle with his conscience.
From the end of the first half-house it had been plain that the old gentleman’s memory had betrayed him, and that his experience was not of Mondh but of Pondh; poor, unwanted Pondh, whose conspicuousness on the map amounted to a kind of looseness, since it was not once mentioned in the Treaty. Would he advance himself if he returned with this information? Would he, indeed, be advancing the cause of the British Empire, of civilisation, of peace, were he so almost rudely honest? The situation could surely be dealt with more helpfully by an exercise of the qualities which make a good secretary. His own convenien
ce and the higher ends of man would be subserved by a certain slight adjustment of the facts, with no harm to anybody save the raising up of difficulties in the path of some secretary in a position like his own fifty or sixty years hence; and he regarded the destiny of a secretary too highly to shrink from provoking the incidents which are most characteristic of it. Raising his eyes to the sky, which was a deep and unsullied blue, he said in a clear voice, “Let Pondh be Mondh.” No feeling of regret rebuked him; and he continued on his way at a pace remarkable on such a warm day, wondering without resentment and even with discipular piety who had been Mr. Gladstone’s secretary in 1878, until he was struck by something familiar in the aspect of the wall by which he was walking. A pretty green creeper ran half the length of it, and at intervals drooped pale waving tendrils a fore-arm’s length down into the street, so that it looked as if a harem had drugged their eunuchs in a body and had stolen to the confines of their prison to have their fingers kissed by a queue of lovers. He came to a standstill, and addressed them very amiably, for he was now in excellent humour: “I have known you, my dears, when you were not half as well-grown as you are now, and far more discreet. In those days your little hands reached no further than the top of the wall, where they used to flutter very appealingly. I have seen the same performance in boarding-schools where the pupils stay late into their teens. I said as much, I remember, to someone….”
And someone, he remembered also, had giggled. Someone had been Harriet Hume. This, then, was Blennerhassett House, which he had not known because he had approached it from the opposite direction to that he had come from when it had seen him nearly every day, two summers before. And here, a step or two further on, was Harriet’s door, which he had often had to pause before in order to compose an aspect that he knew to be disordered by the excessive beating of his heart. It was newly painted, a tasteful green. The minx must be in funds. With a reminiscent smile he decided that he must try his luck and see if she were at home. For all of Arnold Condorex’s advancement had been earned by his talent for negotiation, and with none could he negotiate more successfully than with himself. He had dealt with his own soul most ably on this matter, begging himself to forget that and to remember this, to let that go because it had a sharp edge and would draw blood whenever it was picked up, but to keep that because it dovetailed with this or that to make a profitable whole. So now he thought of Harriet Hume only as a creature lovely as a swan and mild as milk, trim in disorder, prim in amorousness, a personage in the world because of her talents, and a little goose to those who knew her well; with whom he had been fortunate. It had served him to remember that, because it had made him confident with women. And there had been, he had it written on his present mind, an awkwardness on the day of his good fortune, since by some slip of the tongue he had betrayed that he thought more of his advancement than of her or any other woman in the world. It served him to remember that, because it had made him careful with women. And he had not really lost much by his awkwardness, for it had been but two days later that he had had to sail for India. It had served him to remember that, because it had made him believe in his stars. Because of these selected memories, and because the last two years had given him much evidence that he could win nearly everyone to be his friend, he laid his fingers without reluctance on the handle of the door. Surely Harriet had been the gayest person he had ever known. He burst out laughing and said to himself, “Egad, I will tell her I have made Pondh Mondh,” thinking of the transaction much more merrily than he had thought but a few minutes earlier. But immediately his fingers fell to his side, because he perfectly knew what he was going to see when he opened the door.
