by Rebecca West
“Harriet! Harriet!” he cried. “This is a very lovely seedsman’s catalogue you are showing us, but I must confess there is one item that defies my knowledge. What is this very pretty blue flower that grows in the parterre by the foot of your steps, and carries its bells on its sprays with such remarkably aery grace?”
“That?” said Harriet, craning her neck. “Oh, that! It is other things as well as a flower. It is a phrase in a sonata by Mozart, which I like to think he has given me for a keepsake because I have taken such pleasure in playing it. It is also the feeling that was in your heart when you wished to give me a ring, and tenderly reflected how small it would have to be to fit my finger. And it is something I felt about you once, but what that was I will not tell until we are having supper together. If you wish to know why it is growing just where it is, I will remind you that that is the spot where you used to bury your stick very deeply when we stood and enjoyed those protracted partings, which were all long silences, and lookings down, and bursts of speech, and then long silences, and so on, for God knows how long, in the days of our first friendship. But I must attend to my orchestra!” And she flicked a feather duster from under her arm and began to lean forth as from a conductor’s desk and use it as a baton. “Here, you almond trees, can you show no more spirit in dealing with those fine pizzicato passages of your blossom? Fi, you make very feeble second violins! But, daffodils, I beg of you remember that it was ever the fault of brasses to blare!” And indeed they were ranged a little too militantly at the foot of the Ladies Frances, Georgiana and Arabella Dudley, and swung trumpets a thought too superb. “Pray do not drown the scillas too indelicately! Bring out the theme, please, the wood winds there. Yes, I mean you, my hawthorn trees! But I perceive you are doing what I demand most excellently already, both with the sober crimson of your blossom, the rich yet not cloying accumulation of your scent. Oh, this is all vanity, for never could orchestra look of itself so well.” She held out the feather duster and shook it with a great promise of housemaidship. “I will go put this to its proper uses. Yet I would have liked,” she said wistfully, “to be a conductor once in my life. I have no special pianistic gift—I could not,” said she, and proved by her accents that if she believed herself cured of her smugness she was wrong, “for my hands are too small. But I am a sound musician, and I am sure I could have bred perfection by a masterpiece out of an orchestra once in a way had I been given the chance. Heigh-ho!” But again, when she turned from the window, they heard her singing.
For a time all three smoked in silence while whatnots of flowers and leaves completed the design; till the elder policeman took his cigarette from his mouth and declared, “Ah, say what you like, there is nothing can beat the good old lilac! It does not surfeit with its scent; it preserves a very seemly proportion between leaf and flower. And it is not fickle. It lasts, it does not rush downward to try what the earth can do for it before it has fairly sweetened the air.”
“I am very fond of a flowering currant-bush,” said the younger policeman. “There was one at each corner of my father’s kitchen garden. Do you think there is one here?”
“Why, Albert, I am sure nobody will think you are taking a liberty if you look about for one,” said his senior.
“I would like to do that,” answered the other, hoisting himself up; and was presently a stumbling darkness down on the lawn, sending the white proboscis of his lantern among the shrubs and plants.
“What takes my breath away,” said Condorex, as he and the other continued to smoke, “is that the show we are seeing in this garden, which empties pell-mell on it all the resources of Spring, is nothing to the revelation that will be showered upon me in the house.”
The older man made no answer, but he knit his brows, and set to puffing very sturdily at his cigarette.
“Ay,” said Condorex, waxing in enthusiasm, “this does but exhibit the plentitude of nature, but when I go into this house I shall learn that which shall reconcile me to nature, in its poverty as well as its wealth.”
The older man showed signs of embarrassment.
“I hope you will not be disappointed, sir,” he said, gruffly, “for indeed I do not believe there is anything in the house except the lady!”
“Innocent old man!” exclaimed Condorex. “Now I see that you have led a good life, and have never been infected with the desire to rise in the world, nor sold your soul to the abominable principle of negotiation. Else you would know that there is no more delicious knowledge for me than that there is nothing in the house but a lady, and that I need not be at pains to make the one a palace and the other an empress, and turn both to my profit. Why, I do not think I would be dismayed if you told me that there was nothing to the universe but the universe, and there was an end on it.”
At that moment the French windows swung very wide, and a silly tinkling voice cried, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” and the two less than dove-sized hands held out a tray with two glasses on it in the beam of light.
“This is for you, I think?” said Condorex. “The lady is very polite,” mumbled his companion, and they rose to their feet. He took his glass with modest grunts of courtesy, and cried to the darkness of the garden, “Albert! Albert!” Then he turned to the others and shook his head, saying, “He is a good lad, is Albert, but he is the sort that is ever wandering when the beer is handed out. But I will take it to him,” and with a glass in each hand he went very gingerly down the steps.
To the windows, which Harriet’s hands had drawn together, and curtained more closely than ever, Condorex remarked, “You would not have performed these final courtesies had you not been really ready, I am glad to think. But even so you have been a very long time. Were you never taught that since you are a woman it is your duty to please men, and that men hate to be kept waiting?”
“Nevertheless I cannot let you in,” said Harriet, in firm and prudent tones.
“Oh, I know well enough what you are at,” he told her. “You have not lost your habit of picking up your clean clothes hot from the kitchen where they have been airing on the clothes horse, and bringing them straight into the sitting-room to save you the trouble of running upstairs to your bedroom. Lord, it is a low habit! I have never known a lady who had her residence in Berkeley Square that did it, no, nor Grosvenor Square, neither.”
She giggled very foolishly.
“I am perfectly informed of what you are doing at this very instant,” he insisted, “for I have just heard a sound like a whisper, and it was not a mouth that made it but crumpled silk; and from that I know your dress is now a circle on the floor. Ay, and your petticoat has gone now. Fi! Harriet! You are as you would not dare to go to church, shameless hussy that you are. Modest women, I believe, manage so that they are never thus.”
“Why, how do they do that?” wondered Harriet.
“It is, my love, one of those phenomena which confound the scientist by ceasing to be true once they are ascertained,” said he. “And now, my dear, you had better know that I am fully aware you are powdering your prettiness before you put it away again.”
“Would it not be better if you employed some method to distract your mind?” she begged. “Could you not perhaps recite the dates of the Kings and Queens of England, or the names of the Derby winners since 1890?”
“Oh, no need for that,” he assured her, “for now I hear you pop on your petticoat, and I know that in a minute you will be fully gowned, and there will be not a thing to show that you are not a solid saw-dust cylinder to a half-inch of your sandals, like all your cheaper sort of doll. Oh, I am calm, I tell you.” He lolled back against the lintel of the window, and patted down a yawn. “Calm, and very comfortably tired! I can tell you that by the time we have had supper and talked our fill, I will be ready enough to fall into bed.”
“So you shall,” she promised, and from the click and tap of her heels it could be guessed that she was kicking on a pair of new shoes that the fool had bought too small. “And you shall have your sleep out, too.”
“Ay, we shall sleep, and sleep, and sleep,” he yawned happily. “And what,” said he, letting his arms fall to his sides and his head roll back and his eyelids close, “shall we do in the morning?”
A silence fell behind the curtained window.
“What shall we do in the morning?” he repeated.
But the silence was not broken.
Panic took hold of him. He had a fear that if he burst into the room he would find nothing but the circle of her dress on the floor. He ran to the door and rattled the chain, and cried, “Harriet! Harriet! are you there?”
There came a faint murmur from within.
“For the love of God, Harriet, why did you do that?” he asked fiercely. “I thought something had gone amiss with you! But tell me, pet,” he said, ranging himself cosily against the doorpost, “what shall we do in the morning?”
Her voice was grave, and sounded something like the wind, as she replied: “I do not know what will happen in the morning.” It seemed as if the silence was about to fall again, but her laugh trilled out, and she said, with a full measure of her natural levity, “And with that I will not concern myself, neither! Have you forgotten that I was ever careless?”
“Ay, and I liked it, as I like every element in your character, if one could so call that combination of negative qualities which somehow produces a positive effect,” he replied. “But hark! here are our friends returning.”
And sure enough they could be heard treading the gravel path towards the house like great cattle.
Harriet opened the window wide and held out her little tray. “Will you not stand beside me and say farewell to our guests?” she enquired.
“It is my proper place,” he answered, and stepped across the threshold. “What a crisp new gown!” he said, putting his arm about her waist.
“Ay, all’s new, all’s new,” said Harriet.
Bobbing up out of the darkness came the ruddy faces of the two policemen, their wet moustaches gleaming like clean hay.
The younger policeman put down his glass first, “Thank you kindly for the drink, ma’am,” he said, and moved from foot to foot, because of his shyness. “’Twas a very clever idea of yours, ma’am, to turn on all the lights in your house and leave all the windows open and the curtains undrawn. You cannot think what a fine show it makes from the end of your garden.”
“Ay, it shines out like a Christmas tree,” said his senior, smacking down his glass. “’Twas good to look at while we were drinking our beer; and it was good beer, too.” He drew himself up smartly to the salute. “This has ended in a very pleasant evening. And we would both, sir, like to wish you and the lady
A Very Happy Eternity.
THE END
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
original edition copyright © 1929 by Rebecca West
revised edition copyright © 1980 by Rebecca West
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0744-4
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
