Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (11 page)

As they went by the last of the tanks, Harriet faltered and was obliged to rest upon his arm. To cover her agitation she behaved as if she had paused to watch a governess who, good creature, was attempting to train the fat boy and girl who were her charges in kindness to the brute creation by throwing bread to the water-fowl afloat there in the shadowed ebony water. “How I admire,” said Harriet with a weak smile, “those who bring food to the birds! It shows that when they begin a walk they know where it will end, which I never do.”

But the governess had turned her gaze on them, and had on seeing the marks of deep emotion on the faces made a long leap through the ether to some universe thickly upholstered with seductions. She became petrified, her scattering arm stiff as a pump-handle, while she considered whether it were better for her charges to continue in the practice of Franciscan benevolence or to be removed at once from the neighbourhood of persons she believed guilty of uncontrolled passions. The manly vigour of Arnold, the singular loveliness of Harriet, suggested to her that if a seduction had indeed taken place it had probably been of a very thorough nature. She cast from her the last dry white flakes with such a convulsive movement that they feathered the convex waistcoat of an old gentleman who was passing by, and with cries of “Come, Andrew! Come Phoebe!” hurried her charges from the enclosure.

“God, this woman is making me conspicuous!” exclaimed Arnold with the natural fearfulness of the male, and by a not too gentle indication of his desire to move swiftly saw to it that she too got on her way out into the gardens.

She faltered, he supposed, because she felt the force of his loathing. For certainly he loathed her, since she had spoiled something to which he had given the most prudent management. He had met the eye of the informer in a most prudent and gentlemanly way, cold, wearily, yet not inimically, and had poo-poohed the whole affair. “I have no mind,” he had said firmly and sensibly, “to present myself as a suitor to a family that would not accept me as an equal.” And against the news that Sister Sukey would soon be here on holiday and might have more to say over a dish of tea he had built up a marble wall with words only technically of regret, saying that he was likely for some time to be too greatly overburdened with duties to be free for social entertainments. If he had later given the informer a letter to the Director of the Department for the Engenderment of Larger Oysters and had himself pressed his suitability for one of those sought after measuring posts, it was but to mitigate the absolute nature of that rebuff.

Ay, there was nothing wrong about his proceedings, present or future, were they but looked at from the right end, which is the further side of the performance. A tree is the most natural and wholesome of growths; but if one walking in a park should come suddenly on an elm that swept the ground with its inverted foliage and raised against the skies roots hung with clods of earth, he would run. Say he had gone to Castle Sourdeline and in the celebrated domed entrance hall with the fluted columns of verd-antique, had first had sight of the far-famed golden Ginevra where she stood between Canova’s Hebe and the Pozzuoli Venus (not now considered genuine, but very fine), and had looked into her eyes with a gaze prolonged beyond the ordinary by astonishment at her perfection, yet sanctified with reverence; say he had later ridden with her in the delicious vales of County Wicklow, but never out of sight of their party, and had danced with her, but had looked steadily on the white and gold pilasters and their rich capitals, and never on the fair and pleading face she raised to him; say he had been quick to act on the first moment he could no longer conceal from himself how the land lay, and had gone to the lady’s father and betrothed and made a manly confession of his feelings, and left immediately, and entered into no clandestine correspondence; say he had never seen her again till these persons were alarmed lest their darling should fall into a decline, and themselves summoned him—why, what would be that sequence of events save the romance of a high-minded young man who had not parted with a pennyworth of his honour to pay for his happiness. If it seemed otherwise, it was Harriet’s infernal witchcraft that had transformed it, and had, now he came to think of it, engineered this whole situation. For he would long ago have married a plain woman with family behind her, and so forfeited his freedom to approach Ginevra, had it not been (though he had not till this moment admitted it) that he could never bend eyes on such without remembering that dusk in the garden of Blennerhassett House, when she had burgled his mind and seen he meant to do that very thing. Damnable witch, she had enchanted him into feeling a sense of loss and shame for what is no crime, but the world’s constant practice, only abused in priggish books, like the laying-out of wealth to usury! God, why do we not burn witches now?

Meeting his eyes just then, for she had turned at the egress to offer him her civil adieux, she grew pale, shuddered, and jerked up her chin. It was as if a flame licked her bosom and threatened the pretty face of which she was so vain. She looked away from him to the Gardens, to the near glade where several hardy children of the russet-apple kind scattered abroad among the trees while one of their number pressed its face against a trunk; at the near lawn where five fat terrier brothers rolled tipsily in the sherry of the winter sunlight. When her gaze came back to him she seemed to be turned to stone by her wonder that those simple things could be on the same earth as his thought. Therefore he kept it very clean in his mind while he raised his hat and left her silently. He would show no mercy to her whom he now hated so much that he could not speak. Let her burn. Let the witch burn. For she had come between him and every human being’s right not to know quite what he is doing.

III

Y
ET
it was he, not she, who constrained their next interview; and yet it was not he, for the day had altered him out of his usual self. That day was arid. No rain had fallen in England for five weeks. In the country the deepest dell had lost acquaintance with humidity. In grottos and fountains plants that had grown to think possessed of moisture as a property languished in desiccated forms as different from their usual aspect as age from youth. The appearance of the town, though masonry does not wither on its stem, was not less desolate; for at the end of every vista hovered a sinister presence which seemed to be shaped by malignity out of dust, and that dust ruddier and more inimical to man than is found in London. It was as if the genius of the Sahara, hearing that drought had of late extended its empire to this island which had seemed to have water as its constant lover, were come here to gloat. Over the Green Park it stood and mocked at those who had come from their mean homes to seek alleviation there, and finding the air they had trusted to be cool, hot as a fever patient’s breath, the grass they had trusted to be lush, repellent as some old ragged carpet, fell into postures not less fatigued and tortured than they assumed on their own hated pallets. Where Bond Street and Grafton Street are joined it waited for those pedestrians who laboured up from Piccadilly and told them: “Did you think yourselves fortunate that you are not as others are and do not have to work in the heat of the day, but can parade at your leisure this alley lined with vanities? Well, then, enjoy your fortune! What, will you not? You reel, you put your hand to your head, you call a vehicle! Weaklings, I fear, weaklings to a man!” Did one open one’s mouth to gasp for air, this genius was with one in a trice and forced its hot harsh immanence within one’s throat, as lion-tamers place their heads within the jaws of their broken beasts. Did the wind one had prayed for blow at last, it was not before the presence had bitted it and bridled it and used it as its steed.

Even Arnold Condorex, whose body knew as little of subjugation by the elements as a bull’s, relaxed his posture and closed his eyes as his vast Chimborazi-Mecklenburgh took him through the Mall, that was now almost as merely earth as a dried river bed. “Had I remained obscure,” he mused, “I would most probably be swimming now in some green swirling of waters on the Cornish coast. I used to be an uncommonly strong swimmer, I remember.” He sighed, and felt his body somewhat dead and gross in his thick ceremonial clothes. Brushing away the moisture the presence had laid upon his brow, he longed for the lean body that was no longer his, for the waters he might not visit. “But I could never have suffered obscurity,” he argued, “I shall not rest until all men have admitted that I am their peer; ay, and beg me to make admission of equality.” Upright, straight lines appeared at each end of his lips, as one may see in Japanese representations of great warriors, and he became rigid in contemplation of an unseen glory.

His car had stopped. He raised his head with a jerk and was startled to find that they were in St. James’s Street, outside Boodles’ Club, which is the most elegant casket ever designed for the spirit of convivial gentlemen. Its excellencies struck home to him as such things do when seen for the first time or unexpectedly, and for a second he sat lost in them. How discerning is that suggestion of the pagan temple which it makes with its pediment and its fluted tympanum which make apt allusion to the imperfect Christianisation of the English gentleman and his ineradicable loyalty to Venus, Mars and Bacchus! How fondly and pleasantly its use of mellow brick and plump bow-windows maintains that this pagan element is ever by such as enter Boodles’ corrected by sound domestic and social considerations! And how the perfect proportions of the whole warn on the one hand against baseness, and on the other hand against enthusiasm! “Surely it is not a shameful thing,” said his soul, “that I want to forge links between myself and that well-ordered society?” He felt a pang of surprise at perceiving a not ignoble reason for his ambition. But now he had need to find something to say to his chauffeur, who was holding open the door.

“And who,” he quizzically enquired, “told you to drive me here?”

His servants adored him so that the poorest jest of his made them sparkle like women in love when their lovers condescend. “You did, sir,” grinned the man.

Condorex raised his eyebrows, and shrugged his shoulders, and sat still. He supposed it was so; that when he had left the House of Commons he had been utterly ravished by abstraction. Well, who would not, who was to-morrow going to make such a stand for principle as had hardly been made since the days of Burke? Besides, he had feared that if any one spoke to him they would remark his agitation, and would remember to-morrow that he had been agitated full three hours before he had had reason, according to the manifesto he was to give forth to-morrow. But Boodles’ would be a worse place than the House for him to-day. A horde of them would be within, belonging to the old wing that must now be done with, or the sons of such. Beyond a doubt there would be the good young Lord Ladyday, son of old Derrydown, who would greet him with that jolly horse laugh he had learned at Melton Mowbray, that exchange and mart of equine and human characteristics, where hunters find their way across country like great generals, and gentlemen take care to discuss over the mahogany no topic that slights by its complexity the intellectual standards of the stall and horse-box. What a fellow! “Because he approved my high-principled conduct with Ginevra before our marriage,” thought Condorex, “need he come snuffing about me now like a pony that sees one whom it remembers to have given it sugar, to find I have some new dainty of good behaviour concealed about me?” With a start he became aware he was looking up to the bow-window of Boodles’ with a face contorted by hatred. “What,” he exclaimed, “are you losing your capacity for self-government! For certainly you have never had greater need of it!” He would have given a great deal to drive straight home and seal himself in his library, and sit and smoke and look before him, till the hour came. But if he had done so maybe that old man with the radish-coloured pate sitting in the bow-window who looked as if he slept (but old men are often very profound liars) was not sleeping and would say that he had seen Condorex drive up to the club that afternoon, and by God he was mopping and mowing and humming and hawing, and in the end drove off again; and to-morrow it would be remembered and the manifesto disputed. Therefore he must go in and enquire for a letter and come out with one in his hand, very cool and collected, before he drove home. Certainly there would be a letter within, for that active body, the Rutlandshire branch of the Union of Anglican Housewives Opposed to All Amorous Delights, invariably addressed him there. It was perhaps their one chance of writing to Boodles’.

But when he stepped on to the pavement he became conscious of the Saharan presence, standing nearly as high as the meridian over Piccadilly. He stared up into its set and brassy frown. The quality that made men follow him was his proud disposition to accept vast challenges; as he had accepted the truly vast challenge of his lack of fame and fortune. In firm accents he said to the chauffeur: “You need not wait. I will walk home.”

The placards held by the pale newsboys at the corner of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly were limp as if paper itself had need to sweat this weather. “Ay!” he said to himself as he crossed the road by them, keeping his head down before the fierceness of this presence as he had never previously lowered it save to wind and sleet, “these lads are the servants of time and move according to its tick-tock, but they do not know that in one quarter time has changed its pace and will lag intolerably until this evening. In Bond Street there was hardly a soul abroad, but he did not find it desolate. “I do not feel the sun so very strong,” he mused, “I believe that I was born with more vigour than other men, and will retain it longer. I am sure I do not feel myself any weaker now that I have lost my youth.” Positively the vehemence of the day was to his taste, he enjoyed the harsh contrast between the shadowed side of the road, which was dark blue like a thundercloud, and that where the sun fell, which had all the colour burned out of it and was pallid as caoutchouc. He turned aside at Burlington Street and sought Regent Street along the tailors’ alleys, and saw scarcely a body save a little black-coated man or two whisking in and out of doorways with pattern-books under their arms, with an air of being martyrs to decency and loyal to the duty of clothing the nakedness of the English gentry though the sky blistered; until he came on a dreadful scarecrow walking in rags so soiled it might have had a night’s lodging in a mill where they ground greenish flour. So indifferently did it walk through the furnace-breath that one perceived its capacity for suffering to be already fully exercised by the misery which was its constant state, and to be incapable of registering increase. But by a glittering impudence it affected when it saw itself observed, winking its fevered eyes and curvetting its scrawny neck, it showed how well it knew the nature of that state, and therefore that it must sometime have known another. “Disgrace must be a strange enchantment,” said Arnold Condorex, shuddering; and he crossed the road.