Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (15 page)

She remained miserably blank; and said in a choked voice, “I would like to go home.”

“No, that you cannot do, for very shame!” he protested, and lest he should weep with disappointment, tried to laugh. “Come, would you have that dark, decorous, oblate spheroid that is my butler hang himself from a beam (after having taken a deal of trouble on such a hot day to find one in the neighbourhood, for I fear there is none conveniently exposed in this house) because you scorn the tea he is even now bringing you down the passage? And I perceive, my love, that I have showed you far more than I promised when I ordered that tea. For I said, I think, that I would prove to you that it is not true that in a house where ten servants are kept orders are obeyed ten times more quickly than in a house where there is but one; and I think I have proved to you that they are obeyed just ten times more slowly. Will you not pay me for that overweight of instruction by sitting down in that great arm-chair on the hearth?”

She slipped down into it, her eyes very large; while he said firmly to the butler, “On the small table by the fireplace.”

When they were alone again he enquired, “And where, my dear, is that very shameful little paper-bag? For when I have finished pouring out your tea, which I am doing as well as I may, considering I dare not ask you whether you take milk or sugar lest you burst into tears, I intend to sit beside you on the sofa (since it is more than big enough for two) and share some of your low street-bred cherries.”

And so he did, looking sideways all the time for her favour; but got no more from her for doing so than a watery smile and a whimper of welcome.

“Oh, my love,” he burst out, “we are acting as if we were not ourselves, but visions gliding from pose to pose of unreason across the iris of a fever patient! Why do you behave as if you loathed me? It is an aberration due to this stifling hour; for I admit that though the blinds are drawn this room is still a sirop of heat. Your hands prove that it is so and that I am really dear to you, for while your head moonishly plots treason against me your fingers have been burrowing in that paper-bag to find me the most splendid cherries and lay them in a plump red ring round my cup, and have kept only the wizened seniors for yourself.”

“I did not think you would notice,” she sobbed.

“I notice all things about you!” he cried. “Oh, Harriet, Harriet, admit that there is a tie between us so strong that on the Day of Judgment, should I be sent to Hell, you will lie on your stomach at the edge of the floor of Heaven, and let down your arm, which by a miracle will be protracted far past its perfect length, and haul me up beside you; and then you will go about very busily enquiring what the weaknesses of the angelic attendants may be that you may bribe them to let me stay. And if by the influence of my wife’s family I were admitted to Heaven (for they tell me they have done everything for me) and you were not, because some angel that had passed your home late at night had not known how to keep his mouth shut, I will smuggle you in by folding your small bulk in my fitted dressing-case; and I am sure a gentleman’s dressing-case could not be better fitted. And if the fraud were detected, why we should go out together. Harriet, I am sure you know that it is so!—that there is a real and infrangible union between us. I will not say it comes from a mystical transfusion of our spirits, for indeed I do not know what spirit is, and this seems something as homely and natural as could be, ay, and very fixed and irrevocable. It is as if our finger-nails were cut from the same piece, or that there was confusion in the first distribution of our parts, and some of your hair is growing on my head, and you have some of mine. Oh, Harriet, admit we are not quite separate, and do not feign we are entirely so!”

She met his gaze and nodded, though she did not seem as gay in assenting to his proposition as he was in making it. There came a lump in his throat, and as he swallowed it he closed his eyes; and while he sat in this private darkness he felt, in the centre of his large mouth, her little mouth alighting like a butterfly.

When the kiss was accomplished she whispered, “No, we are not quite separate!” and they regarded each other for a time in silence. Then, looking confused and rose-coloured, she spun in a very thin thread of sound the words, “Give me back one of my good cherries.”

He did not, and when their mouths were met again he felt another stab of surprise, such as he had felt outside Boodles’, when he had realised that his ambition to be counted among English gentlemen was in part an ambition to defend a noble way of living, and in this room when he had realised that his struggle to rise in the world had brought him a benefit that was neither base nor transient in letting him live in this house. He had won this woman back when her soul had gone from him; and he had done it not out of joy in his power of negotiation, but because there was wholesome commerce between them which it did him good to desire, which it did him good to enjoy.

“Nevertheless,” she murmured in the shelter of his arms, “I had better go home.”

“I do not believe you,” he said firmly. “You are not a person of importance. I doubt if you have many appointments. You had better stay with me in this very pretty room. It will not be for long, since I am sure to weary of you soon, and will kindly send you home in my magnificent new motor-car. So make the most of your time. And to tell you the truth, oh, my love, I find great joy in having you here among all my treasures!” And he drew her further down into the great chair, and put back her cup of tea in her hand, and smiled at her in pleading; and though she shook her head a little, she smiled back in complaisance.

“It is a joy for me to know that you are lodged with all these fine things around you!” she purred. “I have always beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters. But I believe you are as well off, with such things about as those rams’ heads that ornament each side of your mantelpiece!”

“Yes, are they not charming!” said he, with his mouth full of cherries. “They concentrate in themselves all that air of submission which gives a bleating flock such power to affect the sympathies.” His mind ran on to itself:

“How close a resemblance to a sheep runs through the Derrydown family! It will make my destruction of Ladyday a not difficult matter. He will himself attack me in the Commons, for he does not lack gallantry. That long face, those baaing accents, will win me my case before he sits down; and without exception he speaks too long. I will not have to use more than two barbs of ridicule to kill him.” And then he had to cry, “My love, what ails you?”

Certainly a convulsion had shaken her as far from him as the way they sat made possible, and though he took her face between his hands, and she being occupied with the care of cup and saucer could do nothing against that action, she did not abandon herself to goodwill as he hoped, but stared tearfully over his shoulder. “It is a very odd thing,” he thought, “but she looks as if she were listening to some sound I cannot hear. I wonder if she has some grounds for that pretension to occult gifts she used to make? Can it be that she is exercising them even now, and sees disaster impending over me? Much in this world goes wrong! That woman was dying in the street!” Terror made the hot room chill. “Harriet! Harriet!” he called to her remote, white, listening mask. Then he exclaimed to himself: “Why, how ghastly she has grown! I have always heard that the exercise of these gifts, if they exist, is very pernicious to the possessor. I would not learn my future at the cost of dear Harriet’s health! I must hail her back to wholesome being. Ah, but she recovers of herself! Her colour is improved! She smiles!”

She did more, she leaned towards him and rubbed her head against his shoulder like a grateful cat. “My dear love, how the heat affects you!” he deplored; and dolefully thought to himself, “Maybe the kindest thing I could do for the sad wench is to ring for my car and have her driven home, but ’twill be a sacrifice. For the truth is I am fearful as if I were living on the brink of hell and a landslide expected at any moment, and shall be so till the messenger comes, and she has so many ways of beguiling my attention that she would make me clean forget my plight if she would but stay till then. But I cannot buy my peace at poor Harriet’s expense. But what is this?”

For she had wound her arms about his neck and opened her eyes so that they looked very innocent, and was saying: “I have a friend who has a lodging in one of the meaner streets in this grand neighbourhood. And the sight of those rams’ heads reminds me of a very singular experience which befel her early one morning.”

She paused and primmed her mouth into an ingenuous shape. “Come, she cannot feel so badly,” Condorex told himself in delight, “for she is about to tell one of her fairy-tales, the outrageous little liar.”

“My friend had chanced to awaken early,” Harriet continued in a cosy and circumstantial tone, “and she was lying as most of us do at such times, reflecting on her past life, and promising to make amends. But presently she was amazed at sounds as of a dry river flowing along the highway which betoken that a flock of sheep is passing the house. There could be no mistaking it. These minor sounds which suggest that the torrent of dust is leaping over boulders, but which are in fact caused by the silly creatures’ collisions with each other, came clearly to her ears. To solve the mystery she rose lightly from her bed and leaned from her window, and there in the street below (believe me or not) was a flock of headless sheep, driven by three sober-looking young men. She cried out bidding them stop, and they obeyed; and very civilly answered such questions as she put to them. It was as she had supposed. They were the Adam Brothers, and this was one of the trials to which they were exposed by their immortality. For you must know that the Romans, and especially their gods, have never liked the gifted Scotchmen. A cheerful and materialistic people, they do not admire the austerity of Adam architecture, greatly preferring the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele in their own city or (if they must choose from London) the interior of Frascati’s in Oxford Street. And the gods (and I cannot think altogether unreasonably) are annoyed at the use the Adam family has made of them for interior decoration. Apollo is particularly bitter at the time he has spent in an alcove in the dining-room of Syon House in Isleworth, watching the Percy family at meat. Ordinarily, however, the Adam Brothers are protected from their enemies by their genius. Indeed, ’tis they who by its force apply compulsion to the phantom of the antique world, which finds itself obliged to behave with a dignity that is Scottish rather than Mediterranean. But genius has its ebb and flow. Sometimes the Adam Brothers are less themselves than at other times, and then ’tis the antique world which forces them to contradictions against their nature, and finds them all sorts of ridiculous tasks, such as herding the ghosts of the sheep they decapitated in the course of their decorations. But that, they told my friend, they bear with equanimity. The Scottish are a pastoral nation; and the decapitated sheep enjoy great happiness. All bodies would be glad to be rid of the rash captaincy of the head, and without it they can still partake of the supreme pleasure of gregariousness, which they are permitted by the gods to find in many other places than the parks and meadows. For disguised by a slight enchantment which makes them indistinguishable from other members of the public they attend theatres, concerts, political meetings—”

“Why, Harriet!” exclaimed Arnold, “now you mention it I realise that when I was a younger man I often addressed meetings crammed to the doors with them!”

“And I,” mourned Harriet, “have played to them more often than I care to think.”

“They will not fill up the front rows, that is how you know them,” he said. “But tell me, Harriet, are the heads as happy at the separation from their bodies? For I have grown fond of these two here, and I would not like to think they moped?”

“They are overjoyed,” she exclaimed. “Did you ever know a head that thought itself worthily mated with its body—that did not make grave charges against it for its failure to correspond with the fine form of its intelligence and to suggest the magnificence of its moral attainments?”

“I am a little too stout,” he said despondently, “and in ten years’ time I shall be much too stout.”

“I do not look majestic enough,” she grieved. “I am in my soul very majestic, but who would think it from my form?”

“Yet you do not need to think yourself entirely weightless,” he rebuked her. “Indeed you have given me pins and needles by resting so long on my one shoulder. Will you not try the other one? For though I do not like the pain, I like acquiring it. Now, my dear, that we are more comfortably settled, will you not admit that your story is a thundering lie? For these are not real sheep that Robert Adam decapitated. They are imaginary beings, and I do not see how an imaginary being can have a ghost?”

“But since ghosts are admitted by all sensible men to be imaginary, is it not more appropriate that they should belong to imaginary beings than to real ones?” she enquired. “Though, indeed, it is hard enough to distinguish which of the multitudinous forms of the universe are ghosts and which are not. And that reminds me,” she said, with her eye on the ceiling, where eight handsome sphinxes guarded four urns among a plaster treillage, “of another experience which befel this friend of mine; who is, by the way, a teacher of needlework under the London County Council, an occupation which I do not think gives sufficient scope to her peculiar talents. She has been ministering to a friend who had been stricken with fever at his lodgings in Jermyn Street; and having calmed him so that he need no longer toss upon his pallet and could enjoy some repose, she set forth to return on foot, since she thought the walk would soothe her excited nerves. She was proceeding northwards up Regent Street, which was completely empty, it then being an hour or two before dawn, when she saw two large bodies advancing down the street which she at first took to be motor-omnibuses moving with unusual abandonment. But as they came nearer she perceived many points of difference. These had loose hair, and proud yet passive faces, and wings, and had neglected—as the chaste children of the London General Omnibus Company are always careful to do—to enclose their bosoms within the decent motor-bonnet. She at once perceived that they were Adam sphinxes, and that they had observed her. Rigid with horror, she leaned against an electric standard and closed her eyes. Presently a hot and scented breath licked her face and a voice at once like a woman’s and a lion’s (say like an oratorio contralto’s) enquired of her from what museum or gallery or private collection she had come for the Hour of Animation. She could not answer, and with a terrifying gruffness the question was repeated. Then another voice, resembling the first in kind, yet carrying a suggestion of greater intelligence and timidity, cried out: “Why, can you not see this is no wholesome work of art! Look again! She belongs to that abhorrent species which is subject to time, which changes its form and colour after it is made, and varies in vitality! Fi, she is human!” And my friend assures me that from the cries of loathing and dismay which the sphinxes uttered before they threw off the petrifaction of their horror and lumbered on their soft paws down towards Piccadilly Circus, it was obvious that works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously, and our smell of life. So you see how easily—”