Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  But Harriet was meek as a schoolgirl come to ask its teacher a question. Standing in front of his desk with her hands behind her back, she repeated him in a little voice, “You have not asked me about my music.”

  “Have I not, my dear?” he answered. “Well, it was not indifference that prevented me from doing so, but confidence that you had fulfilled your early promise. I am sure that the faithful Bechstein still whinnies when it hears your step, and that you are a great woman, and I am right, am I not?”

  “I might be great, I might indeed be great,” she assured him eagerly. “Critics have said I might be remembered with the greatest, with Busoni, with Schnabel, were it not”—and she brought forward her hands and laid them on the desk that he might have the best view of them—“were it not for these!”

  “For these, my dear? But they are perfect in every way.”

  “They are too small!” she furiously mewed, and drummed them on the desk. “I cannot stretch an octave! If you knew the exercises I have to drudge over to circumvent this defect!”

  “Yet I am sure, my dear,” he told her, patting them kindly, “that they have caused you as much pleasure as a woman as they have caused you pain as an artist, for all of us love a pretty hand on a woman. I know I could as soon look at one as at a flower.”

  “Yes, but to be deprived of the credit for—!” she began tearfully, but checked herself.

  He did not enquire why she should clap her fingers over her mouth, for he was thinking how odd it was that she should speak of her hands at this very moment. Idly he said, to prolong the pleasure of seeing her impassioned by talk of what seemed to her important: “And do you still give your famous recitals?”

  “Not so often now,” she answered, and lost her petulance in gravity. “The great Karinthy and the great Martel have honoured me by letting me play with them in trio, and ’tis with them I make most of my appearances.”

  He thought, “This is surely much less glorious than to have concerts dedicated to her sole performance, or to have whole orchestras dedicated to her accompaniment, as she used to do. Well, well! She has, I suppose, discovered herself not exempt from the iron laws which decree that a woman’s frail form shall exhaust itself long before she attains the peak of supremacy in any art. Poor lass, I hope the discovery was not made too grimly!” He scanned her face for marks of failure which (since he feared it most of all earthly calamities) he conceived must be obvious and nearly as terrible as the scars of leprosy. But the creature held herself as confidently as an heiress; and while he scanned her the corners of her little mouth pricked up in a sly smile, and he was sure that had her eyes not been downcast they would have been jigging with merriment. “She seems very well with herself,” he reflected, not without peevishness, “she is very near to smirking. Can it be that one of these foreign fellows is her lover? For it cannot be denied that the little wench lacks principle. I have no doubt that did I ruffle her on yonder couch I would be infringing the rights of another; and let us be just, there is nothing to comminate in that, for it would be against nature if such loveliness were not enjoyed. Still, I could have wished it had not been a foreigner. But what is she after now?”

  For she had lifted the full skirt of her muslin gown, and was fumbling in her petticoat pocket, from which she presently brought forth a folded sheet of paper. With an air of being slightly offended, not so much by an affront to herself as by some failure to distinguish what was matter for jest and what was not, she pushed this across for him to examine; while she sank on her knees, laying her cheek on his desk, and playing with the fine toys he had gathered to pierce with holes his too solid hours of labour, such as his lapis lazuli seal, his Dutch brass tobacco-box scratched with a picture of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, and his French inkstand set in malachite.

  “What is this?” Arnold Condorex asked himself. “Why, ’tis a programme of a concert she and her cronies have given, and it is ornamented with a photograph that shows them all. Well, I must take back all I said, for these are very old men, and though Harriet is a good girl she cannot work miracles.” Aloud he said: “Your friends look very grave! You might think they had carried the cares of State on their shoulders all their days, instead of merely diverting themselves with musical instruments.”

  “You are teasing me,” she answered comfortably, and stretched her white arm across the desk, pointing the lapis lazuli seal at the greybeard who held the violoncello on the glossy paper. “That is Karinthy, and he is the wisest man in the world, for he understands Mozart and Beethoven better than anyone else, and they were the wisest men who ever lived. I am fortunate beyond the earliest dreams of my ambition to be playing with him; and we play together, my love, because in the trio, the quartet, and the quintet, we have solutions of a problem that is, I fancy, not unlike the fundamental problem of government that vexes you politicians. Yes,” she conceded, playing a game by chasing his fingers with the seal, “I shall say you statesmen, for you have been very civil to me, and have given me shelter from the heat of the day, and have promised me tea in cups so wide and shallow that I will have to beware lest I turn them over, as I drink, and so thin that I can see my fingers as shadows through them, and so old that the gold patterns on the white ground are as ghosts, for those,” she said, her gaze climbing up and down the walls, “are the cups that go with the house.”

  “I will keep my title,” he said complacently, “for my house is well filled.” But because it had seemed to him that there was purpose in her wanderings, that so soon as she had mentioned his political work an unhappiness had come into her face and she had sought another subject to escape from pain, he pressed her, “Proceed with your attempts to lend importance to your art by comparing it with serious business.”

  She sighed, held her head for an instant between her hands, and said in a dragging way, “Are you not all occupied in finding a form of government which shall allow that invisible thing, the will of the people, to express its sense of the need for its own preservation, and its traditional knowledge of what subserves this or frustrates it; and which shall not be deflected from this end by the personal interests of any group? So it seems I have heard Sir George declare, in such of his discourses as I have remained, awake to hear throughout!”

  He nodded; but to himself, he said, “It is strange that this fundamental stuff of politics has never interested me. ’Tis the negotiation that has ever charmed me, and the struggle for eminence. This is the stuff that occupies poor Saltoun. Well, he must have something to occupy him, for he needs neither to negotiate nor to struggle for eminence. Shall I ever forgive God because I was not born with family and fortune?”

  She let the seal roll clattering from her, and caressed his fingers with her own, while she cast down her eyes and went doggedly on: “… And so, you see, there is the same difficulty in finding a perfect form by which that invisible thing, the form of human wisdom known as music, can express itself. To sit alone at one’s instrument is to be like an unlimited monarch. If one can so express one’s personal genius without let or hindrance, why so we can express our personal follies too. For self-criticism is the weakest form of criticism save among the saints, and artists have not time to be saints as well. An orchestral performance, on the other hand, has the defects of a democracy. The conductor’s task, in forcing so vast an organism to unify its conceptions of what it is rendering, is beyond the capacity of all but a few; and since the labour is parcelled out among so many it is inevitable that some should be given parts too small to hold their attention, and if so much as a grain of inattention lodge in the machinery of an artistic performance ’tis apt to throw it out of gear. But chamber-music! Ah, chamber-music!” She apparently felt strongly what she said, for she had begun to rock herself, and a stranger that looked at her through a glass window might have thought that she spoke in distress. “’Tis the ideal form of government for sound …”

  He was saying to himself, “… I do not think I shall grieve overmuch because, after to-morrow, Sa
ltoun and I shall be declared enemies. He has dared to despise me. I have felt him despising me. He has despised me for the meanest reason, that I was not born as fully advantaged as himself. He had made allegations against my solvency …” His eyes turned, without his bidding, to a file of papers that stood on the left-hand side of his desk under a small jade elephant, very fine, the gift of the infatuate Lord Ladyday. Sight of them made him feel as if this four-storeyed house were built not on the earth of Portland Place, but on a foundation stone lodged somewhere in the middle of his brow. That was mere feebleness. Had he not long ago discovered that the creditors of a Cabinet Minister would never make him bankrupt, since his fall from office would be a final certificate that they would never see a penny of their money? Yet that discovery, true as it was, did not engender such comfortable feelings as the knowledge that there were receipts instead of bills under the small jade elephant could have done. He passed his hand across the brow and tried to dash the knowledge from him. … “Saltoun,” he said urgently, moving to a more favourable coign of the situation, “Saltoun has no power over the mob. He is a most frozen speaker.” Contentedly he swung to and fro the monocle he wore suspended on a broad black ribbon, but never used. “His lack of animal magnetism makes them turn from him when he is arguing like an angel. How far from me is he in that! Let me speak to a meeting for but three minutes, and then let a fellow stand up and ask what was the wisest question in the world, but one unfriendly to me, and I have but to turn on them my three-quarter face, let my eyes burn, use a chest-note, and they will lynch him. ’Tis such as me the party wants. Indeed ’tis me the party wants! They will let Saltoun go. They will let Derrydown go too. Not a doubt of it. Integrity and his inheritance of tradition once gave him a kind of bleating majesty, that would make a meeting touch its forelock. But his years have worked for me. The brutal mob think him but a silly old bag of bones. And Ladyday! Ha, poor Ladyday! A touch of my ridicule will kill him. Ay, they will never dare to lay their finger on that weak point that I must leave in the manifesto, since I cannot see a way round it. I am of value, and the rest are not. ’Tis true, of course, that were there another war, we would have need of Saltoun. But he would then come back to office for the sake of his country; and I could then better my credit by seeming to have cozened him into returning by the exercise of tact. What a verdant prospect lies before me! But what have I been thinking about? Why, nothing, nothing.”

  So talented a negotiator was he that in a trice it seemed to him he had in truth been thinking of nothing. But he was in none too easy a case even then, for he came to the knowledge that Harriet had ceased to speak, and now knelt in an attitude of utter desolation, with her arms cast down upon the desk and her face laid against them.

  “Why, Harriet!” he said.

  But she did not answer, nor did she raise her head.

  “Oh, Harriet!” he cried, and rose from his seat, and went to her, and raised her in his arms. “Come, look at me!” he begged; but the face she turned to him was a blank white mask, on which there was no mark of laughter, or of love.

  “My dear,” he said very desperately, “I grieve to see how things come and go between us! I told you when I came in that I thought I could see the tide of the heat rocking against these walls. I begin to think there is more in that than an image, for I feel as if I were a great stone on the bed of some flood, and you a lovely water-plant that grows near by. When the tide flows so, it is well, for that inclines your fair frondage to flow close by me; but while the tide goes t’other way, your frondage flows far away from me. Indeed, if that tide flowed much more strongly, I think it would wash you from your place, and you would go sailing away, and I should never see you any more! It is a great pity, my sweet, when I love you so! Tell me, can I do nothing to set back this most unfavourable tide?”

  She remained miserably blank; and said in a choked voice, “I would like to go home.”

  “No, that you cannot do, for very shame!” he protested, and lest he should weep with disappointment, tried to laugh. “Come, would you have that dark, decorous, oblate spheroid that is my butler hang himself from a beam (after having taken a deal of trouble on such a hot day to find one in the neighbourhood, for I fear there is none conveniently exposed in this house) because you scorn the tea he is even now bringing you down the passage? And I perceive, my love, that I have showed you far more than I promised when I ordered that tea. For I said, I think, that I would prove to you that it is not true that in a house where ten servants are kept orders are obeyed ten times more quickly than in a house where there is but one; and I think I have proved to you that they are obeyed just ten times more slowly. Will you not pay me for that overweight of instruction by sitting down in that great arm-chair on the hearth?”

  She slipped down into it, her eyes very large; while he said firmly to the butler, “On the small table by the fireplace.”

  When they were alone again he enquired, “And where, my dear, is that very shameful little paper-bag? For when I have finished pouring out your tea, which I am doing as well as I may, considering I dare not ask you whether you take milk or sugar lest you burst into tears, I intend to sit beside you on the sofa (since it is more than big enough for two) and share some of your low street-bred cherries.”

  And so he did, looking sideways all the time for her favour; but got no more from her for doing so than a watery smile and a whimper of welcome.

  “Oh, my love,” he burst out, “we are acting as if we were not ourselves, but visions gliding from pose to pose of unreason across the iris of a fever patient! Why do you behave as if you loathed me? It is an aberration due to this stifling hour; for I admit that though the blinds are drawn this room is still a sirop of heat. Your hands prove that it is so and that I am really dear to you, for while your head moonishly plots treason against me your fingers have been burrowing in that paper-bag to find me the most splendid cherries and lay them in a plump red ring round my cup, and have kept only the wizened seniors for yourself.”

  “I did not think you would notice,” she sobbed.

  “I notice all things about you!” he cried. “Oh, Harriet, Harriet, admit that there is a tie between us so strong that on the Day of Judgment, should I be sent to Hell, you will lie on your stomach at the edge of the floor of Heaven, and let down your arm, which by a miracle will be protracted far past its perfect length, and haul me up beside you; and then you will go about very busily enquiring what the weaknesses of the angelic attendants may be that you may bribe them to let me stay. And if by the influence of my wife’s family I were admitted to Heaven (for they tell me they have done everything for me) and you were not, because some angel that had passed your home late at night had not known how to keep his mouth shut, I will smuggle you in by folding your small bulk in my fitted dressing-case; and I am sure a gentleman’s dressing-case could not be better fitted. And if the fraud were detected, why we should go out together. Harriet, I am sure you know that it is so!—that there is a real and infrangible union between us. I will not say it comes from a mystical transfusion of our spirits, for indeed I do not know what spirit is, and this seems something as homely and natural as could be, ay, and very fixed and irrevocable. It is as if our finger-nails were cut from the same piece, or that there was confusion in the first distribution of our parts, and some of your hair is growing on my head, and you have some of mine. Oh, Harriet, admit we are not quite separate, and do not feign we are entirely so!”

  She met his gaze and nodded, though she did not seem as gay in assenting to his proposition as he was in making it. There came a lump in his throat, and as he swallowed it he closed his eyes; and while he sat in this private darkness he felt, in the centre of his large mouth, her little mouth alighting like a butterfly.

  When the kiss was accomplished she whispered, “No, we are not quite separate!” and they regarded each other for a time in silence. Then, looking confused and rose-coloured, she spun in a very thin thread of sound the words, “Give me back one of my good
cherries.”

  He did not, and when their mouths were met again he felt another stab of surprise, such as he had felt outside Boodles’, when he had realised that his ambition to be counted among English gentlemen was in part an ambition to defend a noble way of living, and in this room when he had realised that his struggle to rise in the world had brought him a benefit that was neither base nor transient in letting him live in this house. He had won this woman back when her soul had gone from him; and he had done it not out of joy in his power of negotiation, but because there was wholesome commerce between them which it did him good to desire, which it did him good to enjoy.

  “Nevertheless,” she murmured in the shelter of his arms, “I had better go home.”