Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  “Ay, but that is not enough wickedness for you!” he shouted. “For, look you, these things you say that I have done I have not done! By these supernatural arts you spy out the bare bones of my life, but with a wickedness more personal to yourself you clothe those bones with the rotten flesh of malign interpretation. Last time you saw that I was going to marry the Lady Ginevra. There was no harm in that. I had some natural qualities to match her own that made it not an utter squandering of her hand; and my behaviour throughout was pronounced by those who might most easily have resented it to be most gentlemanly. There could have been no fullness read into the business save by your mind that wanted to decry me. And so it is to-day. It is most true that I am engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow my elders; but I am not moved by any base or mercenary motive. I would be culpable only if I had withheld my support from those who, more truly than myself, are its promoters, for there is here something that must be done for the country’s sake. Listen, Harriet. Since you know so much you had better know all. I will be frank with you. I could not deny, nor would ever wish to do so, that I am beholden to Lord Derrydown and his family for a thousand benefits. But old men grow foolish, and the sons of great men are sometimes born so. Believe me, dear Harriet, the history of empires that have passed, as, please God, ours never shall, all show us that no year of famine nor visitation of the plague can do more hurt to the people than one fatuous counsellor. Therefore, if I allowed myself to be influenced by my personal feelings I should—” His voice was soaring with the most comfortable serenity, and he was thinking to himself as he spoke, “It is very fortunate that this is what I really believe”; and he stretched out explanatory arms as if he were presenting her with truth on a tray. It was into that encircled space there seemed to crash the rat-tat-tat from the knocker of the great front door. His arms stiffened and dropped, he forgot Harriet Hume, he said to himself, “That is the messenger!” The swelling passage of his life that should be heard over all the countries of the earth and linger in the ears of men long after his own sepulture, had now begun. This moment would not go from him; and everything about it was very clear, clearer, perhaps, than any other moment in his life. Almost he could see through the doors and passages on to his doorstep, where the messenger was waiting, the glint of bright metal on the boy’s tilted cap was all but present to his eyes. While utterly visible to the eyes of his spirit, and delectable as if they had been plaited of roses, were the thousand strings that had been cast about the marionette messenger’s neck to bring him where he was. What commendable shrewdness (though he should not say it) had held the other ends of those strings! Was it not clever of him that night, when the Government came so near defeat because of Derrydown’s speech at Uttoxeter and Saltoun’s lack of suppleness with the Press, to turn and see the narrowing eyes of Grindlay, and guess that his failure to get the War Office had done its work and he was now ready to revolt? And had not Grindlay carried himself with a marvellous discretion? He had so dissembled his rebel spirit that to the end he had gone about the old men’s houses, and had been able to pick up much. Why, he had ascertained beyond all doubt that Derrydown had committed the lapse on which they were to justify their splitting of the party for a reason concerning which he had sworn silence and would be therefore (being what he was) unable to defend himself. And nearly nothing had been done in words! Nearly nothing had been done in thoughts! It could therefore so trimly turn to anything one wished to consider it!

  For very ecstasy he closed his eyes, snuffed in the wind of fortune, and puffed out his chest. He could taste success as if he had a piece of it in his mouth. As the tension of his ecstasy grew less he opened his eyes and looked into the face of Harriet Hume. If what she claimed was true, then the image of his enterprise which shone so clearly before his spiritual vision was shining before hers only with such diminution of brilliance as marks the difference between an object and its reflexion. And what she claimed was true.

  He made a gesture towards her as if her mind were indeed a mirror and he could break it; and sent out a cry of hatred, which hurt his lungs and throat as it rushed upward from his bowels. That pain also he counted among the harms she had done him. Since there was blackness humming all about him he staggered to his chair and had laid his head down on his desk.

  “But why,” his spirit asked itself, “is this more terrible than the other two discoveries she has made regarding me?”

  Detestably, since he had not spoken aloud, she answered; “Because then you were outwitting women, and there has been such an immense deal of propaganda in favour of regarding this as a proof of high spirits in a gentleman, that it is neither here nor there. But now that you have turned against your own sex, where the obligation of honour is recognized, then perhaps things are going not so well with you.” Her voice grew fainter. “If it is so I would not be thought to blame you. In the composition of every truly female there is much of the poacher’s dog. We pick up the game our masters steal. To all you have done I consent in my soul.”

  Then she said in a voice like the bleating of a newborn lamb, so small that he was not sure if she was speaking or if he was overhearing her thoughts, “And to-day is terrible because it has shown we are still concerned with one another. Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever, but time goes on, and that stranger does not come.”

  He murmured, “Ay, so it is, so it is,” and the darkness round him became as absolute as if it were the womb, the grave.

  He sat up sharply because he had heard one come into the room; and found that his butler stood beside him, holding out a letter on a tray. It was the letter. He could recognise the superscription. But he did not take it. It had become a toil and trouble to him.

  But he could not send it away. That choice was not open to him. Summoning his rage to him he cried in his mind “Well, what do you want me to do? I must go on with my public duties, I suppose!” and rolled his eyes fiercely round the room, but did not find her. He snarled at the butler, “Where is the lady gone?” and the voice of those qualities which had till then protected him said within him, “This was no time to assert your mastership, he had caught you at a disadvantage, you should have won him over to your side by revealing that you were a pitiful and suffering man.” But it spoke with detachment as if it would not go to any pains to combat that wild portion of himself which replied, “Nothing is so important at this moment as my need for fury.” A bell seemed to toll in him, as if to mark the first of something.

  The butler’s eye was too obedient to its oyster quality to flash; but the letter shook on the tray as he answered, “The lady went past me when I opened the door to the messenger, sir.”

  Arnold Condorex’s hand could not instantly grasp the letter so crooked was his arm with the cramp of rage. But his lips were drawn back from his teeth by exultation as he thought that when Harriet Hume left his house she had not gone into a wooded garden to lie by a lily-pond, not she! She would now be walking along that charred street he had seen, and the fire of the day would be burning the soles of her feet with heat from below, and would consume her marrow with light from above. So passionately that his stiff fingers could hardly rip up the envelope, he wished that the Saharan presence hovering about the housetops might find a slit among the houses to thrust its vague sultry arm towards her, and would cover her up for a while with its yellow sleeve. He longed to see all that would be left when it withdrew again. He would be pleased wherever they were lying, whether in the hot blue shadow, or in the rock-hard sunlight; that heap of tiny bones, shining like grey glass.

  IV

  RAMPOUND had done far worse than this. Had he not! He had obtained the vile George Filiaepandarus a baronetcy to help him dupe the simpletons of England with prospectuses promising much gold to those who would lay out their money in such enterprises as the London Hills Exploitation Company, Ltd. (which had for objects, to send to Covent Garden the primroses of Primrose Hill and the la
vender of Lavender Hill, and to market to cooks and chemists the saffron from the crocuses on Saffron Hill, with as side issue the felling of the tall redwoods of Westbourne Grove.) “For services rendered during the Great War,” the patent of nobility had run, and there had been this and that of questioning in the House concerning the right gloss of that phrase; and it had been stated (and the Speaker, whom we all know to be impartial, had quashed all ribaldry) that what England owed Sir George was per contra that foresight which had made him, through the early years of the War, push on in despite of Dora’s building regulation with those orchid-houses which were later mistaken by the Zeppelin crews for the Crystal Palace. But “Forty thousand pounds,” the lobby had said, “Forty thousand pounds,” Fleet Street had said, “Forty thousand pounds,” the City had said, and (it seemed likely) “Forty thousand pounds,” God had said, who had seen the affair from beginning to end. Oh, Rampound had done far worse than this, and he was still the admired, the popular Rampound, fawned on by the great and small.

  Fawned on by greater than gave their good fellowship to Arnold Condorex. There was an ill-atmosphere about this drawing-room to-night. It was in part an emanation of the room itself, the damnable room. Odd it was to think that this house had ever soothed him by its beauty, instead of irritating him as the fair setting of an indifferent play. It looked very grim in the half-light he had made when, that he might think over Scorchington’s proposition in not too much brightness, he had switched out all the lamps save the alabaster urn on the chimney piece. The fluted pilasters, their grooves black with shadow, looked like claw-nails drawn down the walls, and the gold convoluted capitols might have been the claws that traced them. The painted lunettes on the panels and ceiling were black oily smears from which shone only the whiter details of a universe lackadaisically falsified, swan necks bent by angelic meekness to re-entrant curves, profiles so tense with nobility that the breath must rush forth from the nostrils like the shriek of a police whistle, forearms like fins with languishment. As always, when there was not full light in the room, a shadow fell in one corner of the gold damask settee in the recessed alcove and took the shape of a woman, lying on the cushions in the attitude of Madame Récamier in her picture. Oh, he would like to sell the place and go. But it was not only the room, seen two thousand times at least, loathed a thousand times at least, that gave the evening an ill-flavour. He pushed out a glowering lower lip at the three chairs which still stood about at odd angles as if they talked together in the way chairs have that have been pushed back and left to their own device which still bore on their cushions the moulding of his late guests’ posteriors. Three second-rate men, his guests had been. And Faycequonpeut had left early to “go on,” the climbing pup.

  There was something wrong. He was Lord Mondh and held high office, but the great did not frequent him, they denied him intimacy, they would not come to his house save on those occasions where the intersecting rays of chandeliers and tiaras form a chevaux de frise between the souls of all present. Had he done well or ill to fall to Grindlay’s blandishments, and join in that rebellion of five years ago? God knew, God knew. Certainly the rebellion had been successful, and he attained his peerage and his high office long before he would have done had he been disagreeable with the conspirators. But had he not lost more than he had gained? “And heaven bear witness,” he groaned, “I wished myself out of the business before I was in.” He shuddered, and drew the back of his hand across his eyes, as was his way when he wished to expunge a thought; and he looked sharply at the shadow woman where she lay propped on her cushions in the alcove, as though to see if she had moved. “Is there any position so pitiful,” he burst out, “as that of the men whose steps irresistibly lead them to greatness, but who have neither family nor fortune? Every man’s hand is against us, it would be a miracle if we did not sometimes fall!” And one fall, God knows, leads to another in this damned unreasonable world: a diminution of political credit means a diminution of financial credit. Since his participation in the Grindlay rebellion his creditors had been on him like a pack of wolves, though he had not been less solvent after than before, nor could have been, indeed. The confession of these matters he had had to make to his leaders had, again, impaired his political credit; and when he felt himself about to think of what this had done to his financial credit, he put his hands to his temples and cried out aloud, “My head, my head!” There was nothing to be done save restore financial credit by making that future with which he ought to have been born if there had not been cruelty in Heaven. Why it might be said that refusal of Scorchington’s proposition was no longer open to him, for it must already have been accepted on its behalf by the abstract principle of prudence. After all, Rampound had done far worse than this.

  Yes, Rampound had done far worse than this. Some four years ago he had done incomparably worse than this. ’Twas then that the Government had decided to use naught but Bongoleum for the snouts of submarines, scorning Zongoleum, Longoleum, Tongoleum, and Rongoleum, cheaper though those were, alleging that craft snouted with them could not comport themselves with that degree of defiance proper to His Majesty’s Navy. (’Twas Scorchington, by the way, had made the speech announcing that decision, and when it had been attacked there had appeared a most noble ingenuity in all its parts, which gave its enemies not a piece of cloth they could pick holes in but a skein of wool they had to unravel; that was a heartening memory to-night.) But free-moving merit cannot have its way these days without stirring the spleen of those who come up to St. Stephen’s from the Midlands, soured by nourishment on high tea and the Congregational Word; and these had discovered a lesser Rampound, a younger Rampound, that was not so far separated in the scheme of things from Bongoleum as one would have wished for the party’s sake. This younger Rampound, the exhausted gametes of his parents, had not shaped in the great-man mould of their elder son; he could not stand on a platform looking so oaken thick and tall that an audience would believe England must fall if he did. But seeing him built on whippet lines his resourceful parents had exclaimed, “What might our darling not do in the City?” Speed is often lent to shareholders by the compulsory liquidation of the company for years after, but they would never be able to catch Reginald’s sponge-bag trousers as they twinkled along Fenchurch Avenue, up the side street, into the new building, past the door painted with the new and aureate-promising name, into the office where the staff was new, all save the red-haired man with the wen on his neck. The optimism of these good people (nothing was ever proved against them) was justified. At first he had not been rewarded by any conspicuous success. Indeed, there were some years when things went very ill, and would have gone worse had it not been for the loyal devotion of his wife, Perpetua Virginia, blonde and well-educated daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Badger-Gayme of Bray-on-Thames. But now the lad was on the right track, the foolish inventor of Bongoleum (whose improvidence could be judged from his failure to bring more than one of his legs home from the war) having sold him seventy-five per cent of his rights but an hour after the expert’s report in its favour had been accepted by the Lords of the Admiralty in private conclave.

  Oh, it had looked nasty when the Midland creatures dragged it out, four years ago. But Rampound still throws open his French windows of a Sunday morning and strolls on the terrace of his great house in Wiltshire; leans down to his spaniel and pinches his ear, with that air of doing it to gain time which willy-nilly infuses all his innocent actions; and rises and outfaces the grave brows of the Lebanon cedars, the avenue that runs straight as integrity from the Corinthian Arch on the crest of the hill, the belvedere in the beech grove that Vanbrugh built to ancient virtue. It is most true that Rampound had done far worse than this, and prospered on it.

  The shadow woman on the sofa commented on his argument no more than shadows do; but it appeared she had sat up a little, and one could fancy that her brows were knit and her lips pressed tight, and her silence no consequence of immateriality but a pause to find critical words. Certainly the gold ra
ms’ heads at the base of the mirrors between the windows looked down their noses like one’s father’s friends when one has told them all one has done since setting up in business and they are about to say, “Chk! Chk! I wish you had come first and had a chat with me….” Condorex began to speak aloud, not in his platform manner, but as if he were settling some local difficulty with a small committee of supporters. “I do not know,” he owned persuasively, “that I have ever before known an occasion when a politician could so well serve the interest of himself, his country, and his party at one and the same time, as those will who collaborate with Lord Scorchington in his proposal. For, do you see, this is a very expert piece of statecraft …”

  Ay, so it was, a transcendent piece of statecraft. Notoriously Prince Camaralzaman of Mangostan was anxious to make close friends in the British Government. None deplored more than himself that destiny of insolent appearance which dogged him everywhere. He could not ride out to make the salute at a Durbar, correctly robed upon a horse correctly geared, keeping within the forms of ceremony as within his own skin, eyes downcast, mouth sealed, features moulded flatly as in sleep, without the Viceroy paling and starting back and crying that spears had been rattled in his face, a naked sword offered at his breast, and a huge flag unfurled that for an instant covered all the sky with rebel emblems. ’Twas an embarrassment for the monarch of a Protectorate. If the unfortunate young prince should be admitted to a comradeship of financial adventure with which (it would be understood) the junior and more brilliant members of the Government were not wholly unconnected, how it might sweeten his sense of security, and thus set on his shoulders such a cool head, disordered neither by apprehension nor defiance, as one would wish for in a ruler. “Why, this is true Empire building!” he exclaimed to himself, greatly impressed. And it would not do the young potentate an atom of financial harm, nay the reverse. All six of the experts that had reported on the mine had said that there was every chance it would not happen the catastrophe which would set at naught the hopes of the investors; the possibility of which one could not regret, since it made the speculation a good gamble, and what gentleman does not love to lay out his money on a good gamble? Oh, Rampound had done far worse than this.