Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  But soon he gasped, “This street, I do not trust it! It is very long. Good God, it is unnaturally long! I am afraid it has swung loose into the ether, and that I am walking not along the earth but at right angles to it, and presently shall come to a thin knife-edge of macadam, and shall thereafter find myself floundering up a rungless ladder in the skies. I shall go on scrambling up it for ever and ever, and shall not come to anything. Oh, I am going to be lost in space as well as time if I cannot find my opposite and put an end to these schemings! Do you not see how the aspect of this place confirms my intuition? The Sir Georges and their like can live in these great houses because they have family and fortune which act like weights to keep them down to earth, so that they shall never fly off into space, no, not if they so wanted. But these lights that stretch down the street show what will happen to one who is not weighted down by these convenient leaden pellets, if he stray here; for they go on and on and on, and are very low and of a very ignoble degree of radiance as if they would lead him into infinity and obscurity! Infinity and obscurity! That shall not be the lot that falls to me!” At that he struck his bosom very violently. “Where is my opposite! I must find my opposite! For that is the road I must tread, if I do not deal with my opposite I But hold! Is that not a very familiar corner over there? Is that the side-street I must take?”

  He ran across the street hotfoot. “Ay, this has a look of it,” he muttered, and rubbed his nose against first one pillar of a porch and then the other to see what number was painted there; and when it appeared there was a one craned his neck backward to read it on the fanlight. “Eighty-three,” said he. “Eighty-three. ’Tis odd that I cannot remember if it was at Eighty-three I used to turn off the damnable street; and odd that I should forget so relevant a number, when I have had at my finger-tips the figures of population that the last two India Office papers on the subject have ascribed to Mondh. And I fear that nothing regarding the City is likely to be of much service to me henceforward.” He loitered about the pavement, biting his nails and looking up and down the street, not knowing what to do; and presently, looking from the corner down the side-street, caught sight of a small white dog sitting on its hunkers in the gutter under a lamp-post, very busy with what it was doing. From further along the street came the voices of a man and a woman, crying together, “Tray! Tray! What are you doing?” to which the dog looked up with a leer that said very plainly, “For two pins I will tell them, if they do not hold their peace”; for he was a very low kind of dog, a fox-terrier such as seems to be wearing a cloth cap, and to be at home in gin palaces and wherever the fancy are found.

  “Why, little dog, you look to me very much like an omen,” said Condorex, and waited.

  The man and the woman who were calling the dog stood side by side, stockish and alike as brother and sister might be, at the foot of steps leading from a house of less pretensions than those in the broader thoroughfare but of respectable appearance: and from the open door behind them an old voice creaked, “Andrew! Phœbe! Will you not come in and get your father Paris on the wireless? For there is Dean Inge at London and one imitating the noises of little children and farmyard animals at Daventry, and you know your father has the gout.” And the two turned and cried, “Yes, when we have found our little dog! We must not lose him the very first day.”

  “Ay,” said Condorex. “The pieces are fitting together at last. I am sure that I am where I wish to be; for these people inhabit the same dream of the Creator as my opposite.” He walked past them as they stood calling in their clipped honest voices, “Tray! Tray! What are you doing?” and with a slanting look saw them knitting their simple sandy brows as they stared through the darkness. “That such guileless things,” he jeered, “should be a guide to truly important business! Not that I am there yet. It is round the corner. Dragons and dangerous things have twisted passages to their lairs. Ay, see where we are!”

  For there, across the road, was the long wall of Blennerhassett House. The bare strands of creeper waved from it like the fleshless arms of the long dead; and the moon shone bright on the brass handle of the door.

  “Is this not peace?” he sighed, crossing the road at a leisurely pace, since there was now no need to hurry any more. “What peace is like an accomplished ambition! But what is this?” He stopped in the middle of the highway.

  For though there was now, owing to a rising wind, a marble screen of moonlight clouds pierced here and there with windows giving on to the pure stuff of night, and though the macadam beneath his feet shone like dark glass, there were other things than these and the stucco fronts of Kensington before his eyes. It seemed as if a high hill lifted its shoulder against a sky that was diamond hard and dazzling as Northern skies are in the night, and did so a second time in a round lake at its feet, whose smoothness was ringed by circles fine as the lines about a woman’s neck. The waters of the lake lapped and sobbed among the sedges at its rim; and a sound of bells came from the darkness at the side of the hill. They were all saying one thing, the sky and the hill and the lake and the bells. They were saying, “Harriet Hume is here, she is ours, she is here.”

  But he shook his head. “Nay,” he told the lot of them very resolutely, “You are wrong. For she said to me I had the gift to have supernatural knowledge of her as strongly as she had the gift to have it of me, would I but exert myself; and in such a universal crisis as this (for indeed I consider it no less) I do not scruple to use it. And it tells me very plainly that she is here in Blennerhassett House. I would wager the fortune I hope to have if all goes well to-night that when I open that door I will see the light shining through her sitting-room jalousies. The rest of the house will be dark, I grant you, for society has long lost the freak of resorting to this dismal suburb for its amusement: but Harriet will be where I wish to have her. Wait.”

  He laid his hand on the door-knob; but before he turned it he had to stand still and laugh into his fingers for a second. “I cannot help but be entertained,” he chuckled, “when I think how she herself instructed me in the plaguy secret of this loose knob, and bade me never forget it. Well, she cannot say that I have not obeyed her.” He held back for an instant to make another matter clear. “The light will be coming through the slits in the jalousies,” he predicted, with his forefinger on his brow, “and in a great beam at their middle, for the jade has left them a little open. Now for it.”

  It was exactly as he had foretold.

  “I have hitherto disdained to use your resource of magic,” he said coldly towards the yellow window, “but you see I am nearly your equal in it. Well, I need not hurry. I have you trapped. You cannot leave your house save by this garden. I will see you the minute you show yourself at the window, and if you turn down the light and run for it you will perhaps regret the ardour with which you have confused all substances you can lay your will to, for against the white sand you have made of the moonlight on your lawn, your floating form will show with an admirable distinctness. Since all the cards are in my hands I can afford to take my time and arrange to enjoy the play better by taking a thorough survey of the setting, which upon my soul is uncommonly pretty for such a factory of mischief as this has been for me.” He cast his eyes about the neat groves and parterres, the wrought-iron gate that threw its lyrelike shadow on the grass beyond, the shrubbery that was so gracefully disposed about the foot of the iron steps to the house. “This ingenious garden has still its air of being a park,” he owned in grudging accents, “of being genteel and harmonious no matter how meanly it is partitioned and surrounded. And there, I perceive, stand the ladies Frances, Arabella, and Georgina Dudley. Hold now, I would look into their state.” He strode hastily across the green to them, glancing over his shoulder to see that no advantage was taken of his distraction; she must not get away. He inspected them as carefully as the trees in the Park. “I had thought,” he murmured, “that she might have left one dead leaf or one bud in her own garden. But I see that her carefulness has taken no chances. Heigh-ho!” He turned away,
though not before he had said icily to them, “You do not seem to have greatly bettered your estate by leaving my house, your ladyships. But you are doubtless under just such an enchantment as myself. Well, that will be soon broken, I can promise you.”

  He strolled down the lawn towards the house, a gloating smirk on his face. “Now is a mystery explained,” mused he. “I have heard salesmen in shops holding out goods to their customers and saying, ‘This is all silk,’ or, ‘This is all wool,’ and have wondered at the voluptuousness in their tone. But indeed there is a delicious quality in a state of wholeness. I am deriving a most exquisite satisfaction from being all hate, as I am now.”

  At the foot of the steps he paused. “Did ever bridegroom go to his wedding-chamber with so intense an emotion as fills my bosom now?” he breathed. “Nay, why should he? For what he is about to do he had probably done before and will certainly do a thousand times after. But my occupation is unique. Since, having but one self, I can have but one opposite, I can never again have the pleasure of destroying it. And what profit I shall derive from it! After to-night all tides shall flow my way.”

  Softly he climbed the steps to the little terrace outside the French window; and said into his pocket: “Come forth, my friend, my deliverer.” His lips blubbered on his pistol, his eyes rolled upwards. “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! Oh, all angels! Pour down your blessings on my friend, my deliverer! And now,” said he, getting down on his knees by the window, “we shall send our message to our opposite through one of these slits in the shutters. There is nothing to prevent me from going into the room and doing justice straight and without falderals, but I am feeling fantastical, and it will entertain me to sight the source of my ruin through this narrow space and send my bullet winging through it on a mission. Come, friend, deliverer, advise me! Is this the most admirable slit for our purpose?” Yet when he had fixed his weapon there, a fit of shuddering shook him from head to foot, and for an instant he could not proceed with his enterprise. “What agonies of apprehension the poor wretch must be enduring through her gift of foreknowledge!” he muttered through his teeth; but steeled himself. “And why should she not suffer as I have suffered in my ruin?” he asked wildly; and set his eye askew against the slit, to take his aim and save his life.

  But then it was that two heavy hands came down on his shoulders. His pistol crashed to the ground; and as he swung about and tumbled back on his haunches against the shutter, he saw that two tall men were standing over him.

  He shrieked with fear.

  The two men swayed backwards as his shriek rushed up into the night as if to let it pass, and then bent over him again.

  “Oh, God above!” he muttered, squirming and looking from the face of one to another and seeing nothing but patches of white dimness between a helmet and a chin-strap. “Has my opposite not only done me all this spiritual mischief, but has raised up a material army against me also! How very strange you look! Those are very ridiculous, those brass buttons that go down your chest like the buttons on a child’s bodice, and the leather strappings on your helmets are as foolish a device as I have ever seen. But how now! Is it possible that you look strange only because you are so excessively familiar? Are you policemen?”

  The two looked at each other with a gentlemanly kind of diffidence. “Ay,” said one, who was the taller and the older of the two. “We are W Division men; and the lady telephoned to the station for us about half an hour ago.”

  “I said that the world was chockful of interference,” groaned Condorex; and fell right back against the shutter.

  A creak announced that the French window in the middle was being opened further, and they all turned their heads. Into the widened beam of light two hands fluttered like a brace of doves much under standard size, and from within a silly tinkling voice cried through sobs: “Did I not tell you that I knew everything in your mind? And did I not tell you, too, that ’tis my one duty not to die?”

  “So,” said Condorex.

  He was sitting on the stone now, with his legs sticking out in front of him and his chin digging down on his chest. “And yet I do not understand!” he sighed. “Surely I wrapped up the thought in enough coverings? For I will swear to you that, what with dark talk about opposites and the like, I had completely disguised my intention from myself. I had no notion that I meant to kill you till I saw the moonlight shining on the brass knob of your door.”

  “God forgive me,” wept Harriet Hume, “I mastered that trick of yours so long ago.”

  He sat for a while so motionless that even himself almost believed he was dozing. The wide beam narrowed and widened a little as her quivering frailty swayed between the windows. The dark garden waited.

  At length he jerked up his head and said imperiously to the two policemen: “Officers, do your duty! I will not resist you, or claim any privileges I might obtain by my rank. For bad as I am, and mad as I am, I have never disputed but that you must reign supreme. I know well enough that if you had not been practising that vigilance which has enabled you to prevent me from dealing as I wished with Harriet Hume, I would myself long ago have fallen a victim to some footpad, or perhaps a more exalted enemy, since the old men would have loved to send a grandson against me any day. Hail, law, exercise your functions! Bring out your gyves! I have enough love of order to find a curious bittersweet pleasure in wearing them, since I must admit I am disorder personified. Besides,” he continued, in a more shamefaced manner, “I am that from which a community would in any case, however catch-as-catch-can its standards regarding murder might be, want to purge itself. For I am an ass. If killing were as permissible as eating butter, I still had no need to kill poor Harriet. Now that I have heard her bland though not very intelligent voice I know that she has done me no mischief. It is I who have contrived my own ruin by my own qualities. She was but conscious of them. She did not manufacture either them, or the external circumstances against which they dashed themselves to pieces. Yet,” said he, rubbing his chin and looking before him pensively, “I still feel I have a case against her.”

  “Ay, and you have!” faltered poor Harriet, who was so shaken by her emotion that her parchment-coloured skirts kept bobbing back and forth from the window, in and out of the light. “The strongest in the world!”

  “I believe,” said Condorex, “that you are generous enough to reveal it to me.”

  “Why, what was the use of me being so innocent in this g-g-garden,” she bleated into her handkerchief, “when I had no power to impose my state on the rest of society? I may have been innocent, but I was also impotent. If I had derived a comprehension of harmony from my art, it was a grave lack in me that I could not instil it into others and establish it as the accepted order of life: and I should be churlish if I blamed those who have the power I lacked, and went out into the world, and did what they could or what they knew to govern it. Humanity would be unbearably lackadaisical if there were none but my kind alive. ’Tis the sturdy desire you have to shape the random elements of our existence into coherent patterns that is the very pith and marrow of mankind. Think, my love! You must admit that when you were not pursuing the chimera of greatness, you performed many very worthy achievements that enabled our species to establish itself on this globe more firmly. Did you not see to the building of bridges, the teaching of children, the suppression of riot and bloodshed? Is that so small a thing?”

  “True, I was an excellent administrator,” he agreed gloomily. “But all the same I feel guilty beside you and your life spent in contemplation of the eternal beauties. Do not forget that I found it impossible to work without surrendering to the principle of negotiation; and that it led me to murder, and logically so. For that principle forbids one ever to let the simple essences of things react on each other and so produce a real and inevitable event; it prefers that one should perpetually tamper with the materials of life, picking this way with the finger-nail, flattening that with the thumb, and scraping that off with one’s knife and stamping it on the ground at one’s feet; a
nd the most ambitious performance in that line, ay, and the most effective and—” he drew his hand across his brow, looked down on it with repugnance, and with a shuddering wiped it on his coat—“as I now know with every sweating pore of my body, the most horrible, is murder.”