Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  She paused, but not to look at him: to pass a tiny handkerchief across her lips. Timidly she continued. “You are to be allowed to proceed far enough for your guilt to be established, and then the Government, with much sanctimoniousness of the Roman father kind, will cut you off as rotten branches. I tell you with more coherence than Sir George imparted to his story, but not more certainty. The disgrace your enemies plan, it seems, is final—”

  They sat in silence, until she cried out, “Arnold! This is a great peril, like a flood or fire, that must be fled!”

  He did not answer. He had rested his elbows on the desk and covered his eyes with his hands. On the dark screen of his lids appeared, with a dreadful distinctness, the mob of his creditors. There had not gone from them Ginevra, whom he saw just as she would be at this moment, dancing at the Embassy, her jaw slightly dropped although she spoke, as if conversation were a ball she must hold in her mouth as a boar’s head holds its apple. It was unfortunate that success was one of the few ideas the creature entertained. There is surely no hell like living with a mate whom one despises, yet who presumes to despise one. God! It could not be that the universe was framed to leave him in this trap! Nay, it was this Cassandra who was jockeying to ruin, and not destiny! His fists crashed down on the desk. Of course, she had put a malign interpretation, in her old way! He did not care whether the butler were listening at the door. This thing must be blown out of the house by the most forcible explosion spirit and lungs could produce. Therefore he blustered across the seal and inkstand and dispatch box, striking the desk so that they danced and danced again, “Busy as I am need you have brought me this old man’s tattle!”

  “Ever since I supported the old man in his automobile I have been hoping that I need not,” said Harriet wearily. “And because I debated it so keenly it was not I who played my part in Mozart’s Water Music, but my fingers that found their way home like dogs whose masters have fallen dead by the wayside. And I have been standing half an hour opposite this house, looking up at the room where I knew you sat alone, before I could bring myself to knock on your door. Believe me, I take no pleasure in bringing you bad news.”

  He cut into her words to ask quickly and softly as one actor might speak to another as they waited in the wings: “You knew I sat alone? What, can you exercise your gift at such a range? In the same tone she answered, “Yes, and further,” and he immediately flung himself into his set speech and was about to say, “So you persuade yourself! But I will have you know—” when he noted that she had closed her eyes, courteously forebearing to screw them up, but resolutely lowering smooth lids to protect herself from what she might of his Boreas manner. “Is it not odd,” he wondered, “that I feel as if we had lived together for a triple lustre or so, and had our first boy at Eton, and a girl ready for Heathfield in September, and a brace more doing well with a black-gowned Swiss governess, and as if I had treated Harriet not too well a thousand times, and a thousand times she had devised some bland and patient way that ended all in merriment? It is very odd?” But the bridge of his sentence hung an unfinished span in mid-air. It had been begun, it must continue. “—That this is the most nasty libel ever framed on a business enterprise of gentlemen, and has not one atom of truth to excuse its ugliness! Nor need you have believed it otherwise, were it not your desire that it should be thus and so with me! You say yourself the old man’s wits have died before him. Why then if you are not moved by malice, do you believe what he says of me to be other than his senile ravings?”

  Harriet did not reply, but sat with her gaze bent on her lap where she pressed her long white hands palm to palm. So might appear a gazelle with an iron will.

  Again he thumped his desk. “There is nothing in this imbroglio! I do not doubt that your foolish old crony heard all that he reported, but there is nothing in it! This business is clear of all dishonesty!! I would not care if to-morrow every newspaper in the kingdom carried full news of every step in the affair! Let these senile mischief-makers plot as they will, publication cannot harm us!”

  She raised her head. On the death-white oval of her face her eyes and mouth made three dark signs of alarm.

  “There is nothing in it,” he roared.

  She did not move at all.

  He modulated his voice to something very pleasant and conciliatory. “Look you,” he said, “ladies do not often like to hear the sordid details of the ways which garner up the wealth they like to spend, and I would not weary you. But I can assure you that this scheme in which I and my good friend Scorchington have taken an interest (for we are in no sense its promoters) might have been framed for the market by an incarnation of that virtue which public men like myself must value above all others, Integrity. Ay, it is the very cream of legitimacy! And as for the invitation to Prince Camaralzaman, why, that was a piece of political finesse, that when all should be known, would not be considered at all to my discredit. So, though I am very grateful to you for running to me with this gossip, I think I will not be foolhardy if I smile at your silly old men, and wish them good luck in their malevolence, and go on my way armed in my honesty.”

  He pushed his chair back, so that she might take the hint and rise to go. But still she did not move.

  “Oh, I beg of you, do not look sibylline!” he burst out. “You cannot think how much a man dislikes a woman to look sibylline.”

  She had to lick her lips before she could speak. “Does it really seem so to you?” she asked in a harsh and creaking tone. “That you are honest?”

  “It does,” he answered pat.

  She rose to her feet, but not to go. She cast herself down on her knees on the other side of his desk, with desperation though not with vehemence, and regarded him with a fear that was white as a snowflake. At the back of his mind he saw snow falling on a grave. She shuddered and drew back on her haunches, shielding her bosom with her hands. For an instant he thought she was about to fly and made a contemptuous gesture, as if to advertise that he had no wish to stop her. But she swayed forward with a floating motion, so that he thought again of snowflakes. Her eyes grew vast in their intention on him; and whispered, in a voice dry as the cricket’s call with fear, “Oh, look within! look within!”

  Panting, he put his clenched fist to his brow, while the interior self rolled back the cover of his mind. “Ah, how you frighten me,” he sobbed, till up from his belly came a shout of victory. “Nay, you are a witch, a lying witch! There’s nothing here but honesty! All’s honesty in my mind, and more than honest, honourable! In the past I have done this and that which was not clean-mouthed, but now to-day I can lay my hand on my heart and swear that it is inhabited by not one motive but would pass the scrutiny of law, and equity, and the custom of gentlemen!” At that she uttered a deep sigh and rested her head face downwards on the desk. He felt very superior to her, and cast himself back in his chair, laughing very heartily and tapping his chest with his fist. “All’s well within,” he cried, “and I think I compliment you more than your merits when I called you a witch, for if you had the gift you pretend you would have stepped into my mind and seen that, so far as these matters are concerned, it is a church.”

  “I am there already,” she answered with a melancholy kind of tartness, “and it is much more like a masked ball. Oh, Arnold! This is the midnight of your destiny. Bid all your principles and motives doff their masks and sever all connection with this scheme!”

  Roughly he told her, “I do not know what you mean. I am honest. This is an honest business enterprise. The reports of the mining engineers, I do assure you, are such as make the mouth water. Upon my soul, if I knew a poor widow, I would advise her to invest her all in it.” A piteousness came on him, and he cried, “I am sincere. Do you not see I am sincere?”

  She groaned, resting her brow again on the cool wood, “Then I must tell all!” Unshed tears shook her for a minute only, and she rose neatly to her feet. “It is strange,” he thought, not altogether in the mode of hatred though he was hating her very much, “she b
ears herself as if the tide of fate had invaded a dancing academy where she happened to be taking a lesson at the time, and she felt it her duty to keep her feet prim and not be washed away.” In an abashed voice, as though she owned a fault, she said, “You were not at the rout given by the Countess of Pavane and Schottische to-night. But last night, I think, you were among the guests of Mrs. Chutzpe-Ponem, the South African millionairess.”

  “That is true,” he said, and again he felt fear.

  “And so was I,” she said, “and stood at your elbow in the doorway of the Golden Room, while an Italian singer in the further salon sang an aria from Gluck. At first I did not know you were my neighbour and approached only that I might better partake of the manna of that music. But there came at once the feeling in my brow which means I am going to share in your thoughts. It must resemble, I fancy, the tremor felt by a water-diviner when his rod twitches in his hand.”

  “You must excuse me interrupting you, my dear,” he said, laughing very loudly, “but have you ever had this remarkable gift with any other man?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Why, that is very strange,” he cried, choking with merriment. “Surely you will admit that it is very strange you should not have had it with at least one or two other men as well as my poor self.”

  She held her head high and agreed serenely. “Yes, I think it very strange”; and then continued, “At that I instantly recognised you, though you were standing with your back to me. You are very well made. Had there been no company pressing around us, I would have liked to run my hands down your broad shoulders, which always make me think of a fine horse. I have never seen you without taking great pleasure in you. But I was sorry to find your thoughts very uneasy. You were not listening to the music.”

  Malignly he told her, “You cannot think how I dislike music.”

  “I do not suppose your mind has ever been free enough from affairs to listen to it,” she said, without ill-temper. “Certainly it was not so last night. You were noting a youngish man with hair the colour of the May fox, who stood at the back of our hostess and whispered in her ear with very anxious affability. I think you called him Mr. Faycequonpeut, and you were wondering if you had got so far and known so many people when you were his age—oh, what have I said?”

  “Will you never weary of spying on my nakedness?” he groaned, rocking his head in his hands.

  “I am indelicate,” she said, and at last she wept. “But indeed I think the same as that over every young female pianist, and I am not ashamed. Do we not all long to have set an unprecedented standard of personal glory that our juniors shall find it impossible to outstrip? Why should you be ashamed of that?”

  He turned an awful face on her. “Now, in the name of Christ, be careful. For I think you are going to father a lie on me. Ashamed of that, you say, as though there was something else of which I had good reason to be ashamed. But I tell you there is nothing disgraceful in my life. I will not give up my scheme. My scheme is honest. I can outwit the old men. I am honest. I can look the whole world in the face.”

  The tears ran fast down her face, though it remained calm as any marble. “Yet from eavesdropping on your thoughts last night, I know the core of your mind thinks otherwise.”

  “You lie,” he said, “you read nothing in my thoughts but honesty.”

  “Yet though my brows there beat the words that beat through yours,” she said, “and they were there: Rampound has done far worse than this.”

  He stood up slowly. “Now,” he pronounced in measured accents, “I know you for the reptile thing you are, who creeps into the houses of those who are rising in the world and injects them with phantasies that make them snap short their budding greatness. I will not deny those words have a certain evil magic. Hearing them disturbs me, I must admit it. Yet I never used them. Never in my life. Yet if I did, what then? This is miching mallecho. What do they signify?”

  She shivered as if in superstitious awe. “Why, they have a dangerous cadence,” she said. “Do you not hear it? And as you said them you saw a felon’s cell and a felon in his hideous livery, and the one was Rampound’s residence and the other was Rampound had he not been lucky, and would be your residence and yourself, were you not as lucky in this business as he had been in his like venture. So it was plainly written on your mind.”

  “You lie,” he told her, “oh, how you lie! You are a very wicked liar!” His eyes were set on the wall somewhere above her left shoulder, and one watching him would have thought there hung there a very hideous picture.

  In a flat and hopeless tone she repeated, “Rampound has done far worse than this.”

  He screamed, “Why, I have said nothing else all evening!” and crashed down in a heap across his desk.

  She went and stood beside him, tucking her hands into her bodice, as if her bosom felt a need to warm something and must use what material it could obtain.

  After a long while he muttered, “Am I insane that I could so delude myself, and swear, and believe I swore truly, that I had never thought what I have been thinking over and over again those three days?”

  In a mouse squeak she answered, “Nay, ’twas but an excessive development of the habit of negotiation which you have acquired during your political life, I am sure, my love, it is of no consequence.”

  He said coldly into his hands: “That was a rhetorical question, and required no answer. I do not think it is of any use for you to comfort me. You cannot conceive how difficult a man finds it to be comforted by a woman who has just discovered to him that he is a cheat.”

  He sat and stared over his clasped fingers for a time. “It makes your offence much greater, Harriet, that you are a pretty woman. A man very intensely dislikes to have his faults pointed out by a pretty woman. Such things should be done by the thick-ankled aunts of the world who still, whatever may happen in the particular debate, get the worst of it.”

  The mob of creditors stood close round him now. Ginevra’s face, blindish-looking though her eyes were clear, as if she suffered from a severe cataract of the spirit, was so near that it seemed much larger than life-size. “I suppose you know,” he said, “that though you have saved me from disgrace you have left me without hope.”

  There was silence. Then he asked. “Are you crying, Harriet?”

  “Yes,” she mewed.

  “That pleases me a little, for I am very cruel, and would like to hurt you. See how I trust you, for I tell you that, and ask you to kneel down beside me, and lay your cheek on my sleeve. Ay, like that. I knew you would obey me.”

  After he had stared his full in front of him, “Now will you not be kind and take a glass of wine and a biscuit with me, to show you forgive me? There is no reason why you should, but, you see, I trust you. Look, they are all set out on that tray in the corner. There are soda-water, whiskey, lemonade, Madeira, port. None of them is paid for. Which will you have have?”

  “I will take some port, if I may,” she murmured.

  “Then get back to your sofa and I will pour it out,” he told her, and pulled her to him and squeezed her, as if he had been a ploughboy and she his doxy, and they had been sitting under a hedge. She rubbed against him in the way of a pleased cat, and nimbly had herself curled up on the cushions of the sofa when he came back with her glass. But she kept her eyes steadfastly on him, as if she could not be sure she were forgiven.

  “You are no Christian,” he said, watching her while he poured out some wine for himself, “you are an animal, and cannot be saved. For you dip your lips to your glass as a cat dips its muzzle to a saucer, and do not raise your glass to your lips, as houseled ladies do.” He made himself a place on the sofa by her side, and sat flourishing his drink with one hand, while with the other he stroked her forearm. “You astonish me always with the perfection of your person!” he exclaimed. “How I should like to have a plaster cast of you in all your purity! How I should like to have it in my room, extended on a couch, so white and still! Why, your little hand is t
rembling, and too cold! Ah, my love, were you chilled to the exquisite bone while you waited under the lamp opposite this house?”

  She smiled up at him and shook her head.

  “But it must be so!” he cried remorsefully. “My darling, what have you not suffered for me!”

  “Nay, you forget,” said Harriet, “it is the Spring.”

  “So it is, so it is,” he assented. “I noted as much this evening, as I came down my stairs and was halted by a very agreeable scent of honeysuckle; although I am sure that as I drove along the Mall this afternoon there were no leaves on the trees.”

  “Oh, there are no flowers yet save in the conservatories of the rich, and no leaves either. Yet,” said Harriet with assurance, “the Spring has come.”

  “How can that be, foolish one?” he asked indulgently, putting his glass to his lips and his other hand on her waist.

  “There is a wind that brings the Spring, however obdurate the leaves and flowers,” said Harriet, “and it has blown.”

  “Why, you are right, my pet,” he agreed. “I remember how when one was coming home late from a party in the days of one’s youth, a wind would blow on one from the end of the street where the dawn was presently to be, and one’s young blood leapt to know that the winter was gone.” He held out his glass to her that she might sip from it, and motioned her to give him hers that he might exchange the courtesy. “You are the cosiest of company,” he told her, and passed his hand up and down the pipestem of her waist. “Ah, youth was good!” he sighed: and let himself muse as if his young days had been more pleasant than they were, and had been spent far more in Harriet’s society than was the case. He sipped his wine again, and said, “My love, this is a very strange, transparent, and bloodless contentment that comes on one in the condemned cell.”