Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  The garden was not changed. It had still, in spite of its partition, that air of being a corner in a wide and rolling park; and it was still, as a town garden should be, less an exhibition of flowers than a green sanctuary. And it was not empty, any more than it had been when he frequented it. In the shade of the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley was a deck-chair of yellow and white striped canvas, on which he was sure, though its back was turned to him, there reposed a young man enjoying the liberty of shirt-sleeves; for there dangled beside it an almost bare arm obviously belonging to a male. The down on it, he thought sombrely, were one to approach near enough to see it, would be fair. A book and some weekly journals lay on the grass by the chair. He made himself at home, this young man, whoever he might be. Indeed the afternoon seemed to be passing here so pleasantly that the mouth could not help but water. For nearer the centre of the lawn was a light iron table pierced by a giant dust-and-orange umbrella, the same as may be seen on the terrace of any French hotel, and by this stood Harriet, looking infinitely ductile with contentment.

  She had not lost an atom of her innocent loveliness. She was very much the same in her appurtenances also. For she was wearing, as she had always done, a parchment-coloured gown that showed her shape to the waist and then became a thousand pleats of fine muslin; and it still seemed incredible that there should be a grown woman’s feet in those tiny sandals; and at her bosom she had pinned, as he had seen her do a dozen times when she was in a good mood, her favourite rose, an open-eyed and golden flower with a grainy brownness at its centre, exhalent of honey. The only novelty about her aspect was her peasantish broad straw hat which she had pushed back until its elastic was strained low across her throat, and it hung like a great O behind her shoulders; yet that was not so novel either, for it had seemed to him that he had always been aware that she would look just such a melting dove of deliciousness if one hung a peasantish hat like a great O behind her shoulders. Of the same dubious truth it was that he had never seen her do exactly what she was doing at the moment; which was to look down into a tumbler and swirl it round and round, because there was sugar to be melted and she, the lazy slut, would not run back to her house for the spoon she had forgotten. Yet, if he had never seen her do that, how did he know so well that, though she would not run back to the house in her own interest, her little ankles would twinkle up the steps to her French window in no time had it been he who held a glass of her lemonade in his hand and had need of a spoon?

  In fact, she was unaltered, and she was exquisite. But can the semi-sacred charm of familiarity, can true delight, attach to that which has been apprehended by a process other than natural? He retreated a pace from the door, regarding it with loathing. Surely it is established as firmly as any article of our faith that the only occasion on which a door is not a door is when it is ajar. It has no license to be a lens through which the unseen can be seen, it has no permit to tamper with time and exhibit that which has not yet been encountered. Addressing it in firm tones, he said, “I will not trouble to go in, on such a fine day she will not be in town,” and passed on, bending his brows again over the business of making Pondh into Mondh; a transaction which he never admitted to a soul, neither with laughter, as he had meant to admit it to his Harriet, or in solemnity.

  So he passed on, and did not see his Harriet until a December afternoon, criss-crossed with the residue of its yesterday’s light snowfall, more than four years later. Heavens! how well he felt that day! He tingled with good health and energy and prosperity. That was why after he had had luncheon with old Lord Ketchup in Hyde Park Gate he left by foot and crossed the Kensington Road that he might walk part of his way back to Albany through the Park. Lord, he felt well! All turned to satisfaction in him. This very walk afforded proof of how neatly his days were dovetailed in these times, and what good cabinetmaking these adjustments had achieved. He would take a stroll through the Park, which would keep his figure slim; he would look in on his club, the Senile Abercorn, to which by marvellous good fortune he had been elected three years before in spite of his inconsiderable age, and take his ease where no one at his birth could have predicted he would take it, and be civil to such notable people as he chanced to see; and then he would go at leisure to his rooms in Albany and oversee the preparations his valet had made with the pigskin (none had sprucer luggage than he had now, who came to London with a tin-trunk) for this all-important Christmas visit to Ireland; and later he would find himself, with everything he needed for both body and soul, surely the best-found passenger in the night mail for Holyhead.

  A regime always as provident as this, he reflected as he trudged along, had made him whom they had early ceased to call a man of promise only because his promise had come so soon to fulfilment. Prudence and hard work, these two had set him well on the way to rise in the world to a height that all would have to note; and what was so blessed was that he had had to pay for it with no sacrifice at all. He had sacrificed none of his principles; and once or twice had taken a firm and fearless line, careless of public opinion, that had proved very popular. Nor had he been obliged to sacrifice his robust health to his assiduity. His marvellous sense of bodily well-being was proof of that. The elasticity of his own tread intoxicated him, and he was enchanted to observe that in the short space of Kensington Road he had need to promenade before he entered the Park he outstripped two or three young men who seemed to be still in their twenties. Though the air was stinging, his circulation was so well able to resist it that he could enjoy the beauties of nature as wholeheartedly as if he were walking on a June afternoon; and indeed they deserved enjoyment. “It can all be done in one single line,” Winter was saying of the trees, “if one is careful to keep the point of the pen on the paper, and charges it discreetly with the indian ink. And line, of course, is the thing. But it cannot be done all this way unless you choose a good solid dull sky as a background. You will be driven to the weak, water-colour methods of my poor sister Spring if you confuse your background with dots and dashes of sunshine; and if you flood it with a gross plenitude of blue as Summer does there is nothing for it but to go in for her shapeless and strong-coloured flummery of leaves. And if you let all get sodden with gold, as Autumn does, then there is nothing for it but to paint like Turner and be damned. But if you care for line, why here it is.” And there it was, on each side of the road through Hyde Park, in black traceries on dun that made the human attempts at acuity in the form of the spiked railings below seem bluntness itself; and yet further off, out of the foreground of the eye, where they marked the course of the Ladies’ Mile and Rotten Row, they melted into a lacey darkness soft as soot.

  Because the grass beneath them was brindled with light snow, this darkness seemed intense to the point of vehemence. Now that the earth itself had taken on the colour of old age the tree-trunks themselves, which at other times are the least spectacular forms of growth, created such a feeling of resolute increase as is given ordinarily by some prodigious show of leaf or flower or fruit. They might have been black flames thrusting upwards through the effete soil, from some subterranean power-house which was far too much in earnest to paint them with the ruddy hues that belong to fires of a more superficial kindling. The scene, full as it was of a sense of the life of earth in spite of being crowded with signs of the suspension of all opulence, suggested a plutonic energy that could work exultantly in spite of receiving none of these encouragements which man considers necessary to sweeten his toil. That impression was heightened as there thundered along the riding-track beside him a party of horsemen whose faces were contracted with pain at the bitterness of the air, and yet were magnificent with pride at their government of their mounts and pleasure in the speed to which they had compelled them. It increased his already enormous satisfaction with the afternoon that not for more than a minute did he feel that cringing resentment which those who walk commonly feel at the sight of those who ride, since he could remind himself that now he was among the riders, and had himself often caused ot
hers to cringe. He rode remarkably well for one who had acquired the art of horsemanship far more lately than in childhood. He need have no anxiety about following the hounds in Ireland. The thought of his progress in this and other matters made him feel himself like a great horse, magnificently sound in wind and limb, thudding down its hooves on soil that Providence had seen was neither waterlogged nor broken by frost, in a gallop that nothing would stop.

  He had intended to go along the Row to Hyde Park Corner, and would have done so had he not seen, whisking into the gate in the railings which admits to the more mannered elegancies of Kensington Gardens, a neat figure, which made him burst out laughing and exclaim, “By Gad! that is Harriet Hume!” He burst out laughing because she was so very pretty, and he did not want her. He did not want anything that he had not got. He had it all. “I must have a word with little Harriet,” he told himself, and crossed the road, for he had nothing else to do, since clubs will wait. Moreover, even seen through the blurring palisade of railings, she was a creature of such special and skimming grace that it was the height of luxury not to desire her because he was about to have as good. “She walks fast, she is like a deer!” he said, as he passed within the gates and found that she was already a small figure at the end of the broad elm walk that leads down to the Serpentine. Gaining on her, he continued to congratulate her and himself by perceiving her quality. “She dresses well,” he said, “she understands her type!” For she wore a little black hat that was three-cornered yet was not so fanciful that it offended, and he wondered no longer why she kept her elbows pinned to her side, after she had raised a muff to her face and buried first one cheek and then the other in its softness. How trimly she was speeding before him, and with what good temper! She was cold, and she desired to be warm, but there was no sullenness about her objection to her state and her desire to change it. Simply she hastened through the air with a movement more dancing than usual and her cheek laid to a muff as amiably as if it were a lover. Oh, she was a good wench, this little Harriet!

  Just then a breach in the trees showed him a vista extending to the very brim of the Serpentine, where certain people standing at the water’s edge, because of the flatness of the shore at this particular point, had the appearance of waiting on a quay for a boat; and a certain disposition of the trees and bushes on the opposite bank, grouped beneath a perspective of spires and towers that seemed inside the Park though they were in fact far beyond its boundaries, deceived topography and conjured up an illusion of a fantastic island to which the expected boat would ferry them. “Is this where we embark for Cythera?” his mind asked him with odd inconsequence and emphasis; and he had an even odder notion that if that were not to be so it was only because he and Harriet had already made their embarkations, and that other selves of theirs than could be seen were even now drifting down a dark stream, their faces pale in a colder and a later hour than this that chilled them now.

  But his mind shook itself like a dog, and he leaped back to his gratifying game of approving that of which he had no need. “I will not speak to her for a while,” he said exultantly, “I will walk just behind her,” for that gave him a pleasing sense of contrast to the days when, had he seen her walking in front of him, he would have had to run forward even under horses’ heads and cars’ bonnets, and slip his arm through hers, that at the first possible moment he might have her lovely face tilted to him and hear her Oh’s and Ah’s. But he could not long remain in that mood of exultation, for there were a thousand incidents in her promenade which competed to distract him. The first thing that happened was that an ill-favoured Irish wolf-hound, putting his fore-paws on a pool of ice, found them sliding away from him and howled in consternation until Harriet tripped forward and jerked him to trustworthy ground by the collar. She bowed her head to whisper to his pale and pompous eyes in his own language that not for one instant had he lost his dignity; and he snuffled in her hand to compliment her on her perfect accent. Then she bounded on, turning her little head right and left to enjoy the icy flavour of the day. The path was running beside the lake now, and all was hard-chiselled. The weakest little woman among the ducks, the most downtrodden wife of them all, who hardly dared call her quack her own, could not indulge her natural disposition to swim without making a V adamantine as an irrevocable decision on the nearly frozen lake. There was no wind-crisped water here, only ribbed glass.

  This world clear-cut as her own ankles, cool as her own hands, was naturally pleasant to her. For quite a time she dallied by a clump of reeds which a matrimonial scuttering of ducks had deluged with spray which had frozen on the very instant, and had now the aspect of a French prism candlestick. “She is like a child,” he thought tenderly, “things that glitter are dear to her.” But she was tempted from her reeds by another beauty peculiar to this season, at which her nostrils dilated with not less delight. So few people were abroad this bitter day that there were no parties breaking the landscape by following convenient and arbitrary paths, and there were no performances of chase and counter chase by the industrious ballet of London dogs. Hence the eye could without disturbance apprehend under the boracic sprinkling of light snow the gentle contours that God had given to the place, and the noble avenues which Capability Brown had seen in his fancy when he planted his saplings. The great Metropolis was annulled. The park-keeper’s delicious lodge, with its proportions squat as a Royal bonnet, its pediments and arches reminiscent not of the temple but the grotto, might have been pinned to the bosom of a gentleman’s estate in the Midlands; and one would not have been surprised, had one approached it more nearly, to find the frosted turf indented with the hooves of the Pytchley. “Why, she is like a very little child,” he thought, laughing. “I will lay a wager from the manner she looks toward it that the lodge has instantly become a type of rural simplicity to her, and she is wishing that the King would hear her play and give it to her as a present, and she could live there like a nymph on milk and nuts and berries! The sweet fool! Well, I wish I were the King and could give her what she wants. Ah, what ineffable grace!”

  For she had come suddenly to a standstill, had risen a little on her toes, and had drooped her head, as if she were fixedly regarding something on the path before her. She wavered slightly, like a steady flame. So prima ballerinas stand before the pas seule, if they are excellent.

  “Shall I speak to her now?” he asked himself. “Before heaven I cannot long postpone myself that pleasure!”

  But she had glided forward and was off again, at such a swallow’s pace that he had much ado not to lose distance on her. “It is strange that she can dance along so fast on such high heels,” he panted. “Ah, but I love her for wearing them so high. I remember she was always well aware that to be elegant a woman must walk on very high heels or on none. But she was mistress of all such wisdom. I have never known a woman with more exquisite understanding of the female person. Ah, dieu merci, she remits the pace.”

  For she had laid her head on one side, and was slowly rubbing her cheek against the fur of her collar, with very much the motion of a puss that has been stroked under the ear; and her feet were moving no faster than her head. Thereafter she dawdled. A snail could have passed more expeditiously by the slope where the obese birds that dress in shades of coffee-and-milk have their club. “If I catch her while she is still there,” he hoped, “she may tell me a fairy-tale about those quacking fellows. She is full of fancy. I remember one night when she loved me and took great pains to please me she told me a most diverting tale about three women who were turned into trees. Ah, she is cold, she shivers! Lud, is she ill? She puts one hand to her brow as if she rubbed away a headache, and with the other she seems about to cast away her muff in a desperate though graceful movement. Nay, she cannot be ill, she is all too well, for she is springing ahead at a rate I never can equal….”