by Rebecca West
“I do not believe you,” he said firmly. “You are not a person of importance. I doubt if you have many appointments. You had better stay with me in this very pretty room. It will not be for long, since I am sure to weary of you soon, and will kindly send you home in my magnificent new motor-car. So make the most of your time. And to tell you the truth, oh, my love, I find great joy in having you here among all my treasures!” And he drew her further down into the great chair, and put back her cup of tea in her hand, and smiled at her in pleading; and though she shook her head a little, she smiled back in complaisance.
“It is a joy for me to know that you are lodged with all these fine things around you!” she purred. “I have always beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters. But I believe you are as well off, with such things about as those rams’ heads that ornament each side of your mantelpiece!”
“Yes, are they not charming!” said he, with his mouth full of cherries. “They concentrate in themselves all that air of submission which gives a bleating flock such power to affect the sympathies.” His mind ran on to itself:
“How close a resemblance to a sheep runs through the Derrydown family! It will make my destruction of Ladyday a not difficult matter. He will himself attack me in the Commons, for he does not lack gallantry. That long face, those baaing accents, will win me my case before he sits down; and without exception he speaks too long. I will not have to use more than two barbs of ridicule to kill him.” And then he had to cry, “My love, what ails you?”
Certainly a convulsion had shaken her as far from him as the way they sat made possible, and though he took her face between his hands, and she being occupied with the care of cup and saucer could do nothing against that action, she did not abandon herself to goodwill as he hoped, but stared tearfully over his shoulder. “It is a very odd thing,” he thought, “but she looks as if she were listening to some sound I cannot hear. I wonder if she has some grounds for that pretension to occult gifts she used to make? Can it be that she is exercising them even now, and sees disaster impending over me? Much in this world goes wrong! That woman was dying in the street!” Terror made the hot room chill. “Harriet! Harriet!” he called to her remote, white, listening mask. Then he exclaimed to himself: “Why, how ghastly she has grown! I have always heard that the exercise of these gifts, if they exist, is very pernicious to the possessor. I would not learn my future at the cost of dear Harriet’s health! I must hail her back to wholesome being. Ah, but she recovers of herself! Her colour is improved! She smiles!”
She did more, she leaned towards him and rubbed her head against his shoulder like a grateful cat. “My dear love, how the heat affects you!” he deplored; and dolefully thought to himself, “Maybe the kindest thing I could do for the sad wench is to ring for my car and have her driven home, but ’twill be a sacrifice. For the truth is I am fearful as if I were living on the brink of hell and a landslide expected at any moment, and shall be so till the messenger comes, and she has so many ways of beguiling my attention that she would make me clean forget my plight if she would but stay till then. But I cannot buy my peace at poor Harriet’s expense. But what is this?”
For she had wound her arms about his neck and opened her eyes so that they looked very innocent, and was saying: “I have a friend who has a lodging in one of the meaner streets in this grand neighbourhood. And the sight of those rams’ heads reminds me of a very singular experience which befel her early one morning.”
She paused and primmed her mouth into an ingenuous shape. “Come, she cannot feel so badly,” Condorex told himself in delight, “for she is about to tell one of her fairy-tales, the outrageous little liar.”
“My friend had chanced to awaken early,” Harriet continued in a cosy and circumstantial tone, “and she was lying as most of us do at such times, reflecting on her past life, and promising to make amends. But presently she was amazed at sounds as of a dry river flowing along the highway which betoken that a flock of sheep is passing the house. There could be no mistaking it. These minor sounds which suggest that the torrent of dust is leaping over boulders, but which are in fact caused by the silly creatures’ collisions with each other, came clearly to her ears. To solve the mystery she rose lightly from her bed and leaned from her window, and there in the street below (believe me or not) was a flock of headless sheep, driven by three sober-looking young men. She cried out bidding them stop, and they obeyed; and very civilly answered such questions as she put to them. It was as she had supposed. They were the Adam Brothers, and this was one of the trials to which they were exposed by their immortality. For you must know that the Romans, and especially their gods, have never liked the gifted Scotchmen. A cheerful and materialistic people, they do not admire the austerity of Adam architecture, greatly preferring the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele in their own city or (if they must choose from London) the interior of Frascati’s in Oxford Street. And the gods (and I cannot think altogether unreasonably) are annoyed at the use the Adam family has made of them for interior decoration. Apollo is particularly bitter at the time he has spent in an alcove in the dining-room of Syon House in Isleworth, watching the Percy family at meat. Ordinarily, however, the Adam Brothers are protected from their enemies by their genius. Indeed, ’tis they who by its force apply compulsion to the phantom of the antique world, which finds itself obliged to behave with a dignity that is Scottish rather than Mediterranean. But genius has its ebb and flow. Sometimes the Adam Brothers are less themselves than at other times, and then ’tis the antique world which forces them to contradictions against their nature, and finds them all sorts of ridiculous tasks, such as herding the ghosts of the sheep they decapitated in the course of their decorations. But that, they told my friend, they bear with equanimity. The Scottish are a pastoral nation; and the decapitated sheep enjoy great happiness. All bodies would be glad to be rid of the rash captaincy of the head, and without it they can still partake of the supreme pleasure of gregariousness, which they are permitted by the gods to find in many other places than the parks and meadows. For disguised by a slight enchantment which makes them indistinguishable from other members of the public they attend theatres, concerts, political meetings—”
“Why, Harriet!” exclaimed Arnold, “now you mention it I realise that when I was a younger man I often addressed meetings crammed to the doors with them!”
“And I,” mourned Harriet, “have played to them more often than I care to think.”
“They will not fill up the front rows, that is how you know them,” he said. “But tell me, Harriet, are the heads as happy at the separation from their bodies? For I have grown fond of these two here, and I would not like to think they moped?”
“They are overjoyed,” she exclaimed. “Did you ever know a head that thought itself worthily mated with its body—that did not make grave charges against it for its failure to correspond with the fine form of its intelligence and to suggest the magnificence of its moral attainments?”
“I am a little too stout,” he said despondently, “and in ten years’ time I shall be much too stout.”
“I do not look majestic enough,” she grieved. “I am in my soul very majestic, but who would think it from my form?”
“Yet you do not need to think yourself entirely weightless,” he rebuked her. “Indeed you have given me pins and needles by resting so long on my one shoulder. Will you not try the other one? For though I do not like the pain, I like acquiring it. Now, my dear, that we are more comfortably settled, will you not admit that your story is a thundering lie? For these are not real sheep that Robert Adam decapitated. They are imaginary beings, and I do not see how an imaginary being can have a ghost?”
“But since ghosts are admitted by all sensible men to be imaginary, is it not more appropriate that they should belong to imaginary beings than to real ones?” she enquired. “Though, indeed, it is hard enough to distinguish which of the multitudinous forms of t
he universe are ghosts and which are not. And that reminds me,” she said, with her eye on the ceiling, where eight handsome sphinxes guarded four urns among a plaster treillage, “of another experience which befel this friend of mine; who is, by the way, a teacher of needlework under the London County Council, an occupation which I do not think gives sufficient scope to her peculiar talents. She has been ministering to a friend who had been stricken with fever at his lodgings in Jermyn Street; and having calmed him so that he need no longer toss upon his pallet and could enjoy some repose, she set forth to return on foot, since she thought the walk would soothe her excited nerves. She was proceeding northwards up Regent Street, which was completely empty, it then being an hour or two before dawn, when she saw two large bodies advancing down the street which she at first took to be motor-omnibuses moving with unusual abandonment. But as they came nearer she perceived many points of difference. These had loose hair, and proud yet passive faces, and wings, and had neglected—as the chaste children of the London General Omnibus Company are always careful to do—to enclose their bosoms within the decent motor-bonnet. She at once perceived that they were Adam sphinxes, and that they had observed her. Rigid with horror, she leaned against an electric standard and closed her eyes. Presently a hot and scented breath licked her face and a voice at once like a woman’s and a lion’s (say like an oratorio contralto’s) enquired of her from what museum or gallery or private collection she had come for the Hour of Animation. She could not answer, and with a terrifying gruffness the question was repeated. Then another voice, resembling the first in kind, yet carrying a suggestion of greater intelligence and timidity, cried out: “Why, can you not see this is no wholesome work of art! Look again! She belongs to that abhorrent species which is subject to time, which changes its form and colour after it is made, and varies in vitality! Fi, she is human!” And my friend assures me that from the cries of loathing and dismay which the sphinxes uttered before they threw off the petrifaction of their horror and lumbered on their soft paws down towards Piccadilly Circus, it was obvious that works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously, and our smell of life. So you see how easily—”
At this moment the timepiece which the brass seahorses on the mantelpiece supported between their wings and their tails, coolly pronounced that it was six. He thought: “The messenger should be here very soon. Dear God, what if he does not come, and all my plan has gone awry? I shall have all the dreariness of plotting afresh how to overthrow old Derrydown and capture the young rebels’ vote. And I am tired, I have had to travel so far since my birth, and I have all those debts to pay, oh God, oh God….” He perceived that on a sudden Harriet had formed a notion of rising, since she had slipped her little feet down on the ground, but he caught her back to him, crying, “Nay, you shall stay and tell me another of your fairy-tales!” But at once he started away from her. “My darling! What is it that torments you? I could not have conceived that any but a hunted beast could have so quick and desperate a heart-beat! Come, you must tell me what ails you!”
“’Tis nothing,” she faltered, “’tis nothing at all.”
“Nay, but there is something!” he insisted, “and it grieves me very deeply not to know it! For, as I tell you, you are so dear to me that it is as if our passion mysteriously made increase during the time we are apart!” He gave her a fierce, loving little shake. “You hurt me so greatly by not telling me!”
She moaned, “That I cannot do!”
“But why, my child?” he pressed her.
Not a word would she answer; and of a sudden a quiet and frightened gravity fell upon him. He was silent for a minute, and then said: “I think I know what is amiss. The occult gifts you possess have told you that something far from pleasant is going to happen to me; and since you are my loyal friend this distresses you. I understand it. But you need go to no pains to conceal from me what you have foreseen.” He paused to dry the sweat on his brow. “I am stout-hearted enough to look into the face of fate without perturbation, no matter what it shows me. So speak away.”
She began to rock about in his arms and laugh wildly though softly. “Oh, no!” she cried. “I cannot read the future! I have foreseen nothing of your fate!”
Grown ghastly, he persisted: “I assure you that you need not fear to speak. I have as much courage as most men. And—” he drew a deep breath, as those who fear they are about to swoon, “—I would like to know, so that I can make due preparation.”
“Ah, my poor love!” she lamented in a whispering shriek. “I tell you I cannot look an inch ahead of time! and that what has appalled me is not what is going to happen to you, but what has already happened!”
He recoiled from her in amazement. “What has already happened to me!” he exclaimed incredulously. “But nothing but good has happened to me, since I dare not say when!” And his mind shrugged its shoulders and said to him behind its hand, “Did you not remember that the poor pretty thing was always a little mad? This second sight of hers was but a bee in her bonnet, and you yourself would never have lent credit to it, were it not such an infernally hot day that you are bedevilled with fever.”
“Nothing but good!” sobbed Harriet, who had fished a handkerchief from her bosom and was turning it to a wet rag more expeditiously than could have been believed. “Do you call guilt, and shame, and treachery good things?”
“Guilt, and shame, and treachery!” he echoed. “But, Harriet, there is no need to use these names of my life!”
“Do not endeavour to dissemble,” she damply begged, “I have known all ever since I entered your hall, and perceived Disgrace standing on your stairs, true master of this house.”
He controlled his resentment because she was disordered in her intellects, and it was very hot, and he had always had a softness for her, and spoke with the restraint of an honest man sure of his honesty. “I can truthfully say, and I thank God I can do it, that there is no such wickedness in this house as you suspect Ah, Harriet! There are secrets of State that I can divulge to none before it is deemed time for all to know them. If my lips were not thus sealed, I might prove to you that such a stand is to be made for principle in this house, before sunset, as would lift you as far above your ordinary spirits as those suspicions you entertain of me have cast you below them. To-day of all days,” he said solemnly wagging his finger, “I can look into your eyes and avow that, whatever evil may be vexing you, it does not proceed from me. Perhaps,” he suggested indulgently, giving the poor dear’s supernatural inclination a sop, “there are bad men in the next house.”
“Oh, poor old Derrydown!” wept Harriet. “Poor infatuate Ladyday!”
He had dashed back to her and taken both her wrists.
“Who told you?”
“No one!” she sighed.
“Nay, you must tell me!” His grasp tightened.
“No one!” she sighed again; and in the faintest whisper stated. “It was my gift that informed me.”
“Your gift!” he shouted. He let go her wrists, throwing her from him so that the frail creature spun like a top and came to rest against the bookcase with her arms set wide along a shelf, looking very piteous. “Your gift,” he said, lowering his tones for fear of the lackeys, but still very furiously. “I remember now more about that gift. It was the heat and your damnable disguise of amiability that drove it out of my mind; and had that not happened you would not have found your way into my house. To give yourself consequence you claim to be able to pick the lock of my soul, and to bolster up this claim you patch together what gossip reaches your obscurity and what scribblers hint in their low sheets, and make wild guesses on it. So you practised on my marriage to Gine
vra and spoiled it from the first. I never could attend upon her loveliness without feeling like a thief, and since I felt no pride in the relationship there was nothing to keep me from noticing she was an idiot. Now you hope to use the same creeping mystic ways to foul my public life. How did the rumour reach you? Speak!”
She did but mop her eyes.
“Ah, I have it!” he exclaimed. “It is Sir George who has been talking to you, is it not?”
“Oh, no!” she murmured, “Sir George has not spoken of you for a long time.”
He crossed the room and thrust his face close to her meekness. “And why not? He has not spoken of me for a long time—and why not? Oh, you need not tell me. These old men despise me because I have neither family nor future, and even pretend they cannot trust me! He would not talk of me to you, because he thinks ill of me, and is too gentlemanly to speak ill of a man to a woman who professes to be his friend. I am sure Sir George is full of such small points of honour,” he sneered, “and thinks himself most chivalrous because of them. But if he did not tell you, then who did?” He set his clenched fist to his temple and tried to pluck the name out of the category of things unknown by speculation. “But no one can have told you!” he groaned. “Have I not burned my lamp night after night contriving there shall be none of us in this enterprise who is not in the same box as all the rest, who stands to lose as much as his fellows by betrayal of our cause. I mean,” he explained stiffly and hastily, “that we are all good men and true, men of principle. No,” and for a space he was lost again in consideration—“you have not heard this by any natural means.” Shuddering, he drove the knowledge home into his heart; and admitted that he knew what he had known so long. “You have this gift you boast of, this infernal gift.”
She had turned aside from him because she could not bear the force of his rage full-face; and rubbed her cheek against a fine edition of Catullus as if it were a pillow, and she tired to death.
