Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (21 page)

But when their lips met he twitched sharply, hissing in his breath, as if an excruciating ecstasy had laid hold on him like a twinge of gout. “But this is an extraordinary pleasure!” he drawled gloating. “You know, my dear, that I have felt for you always the extreme of love, as well as the extreme of lasciviousness. But there was a third emotion always present, which I cannot name even in this moment when it possesses me. Ah, you nod your head? Then you always knew it? Will you not name it? No? How you tease tonight! You knew where my soul was wandering, in that period which lasted either a second or an hour, yet you would not tell; and I think it had some relevance to the point we now debate.” He folded his arms round her, and rocked her fragility to and fro, tenderly smiling down on her, who looked submissive yet big-eyed and vigilant, like a little cat who fears that the petting she receives may yet turn to tail-pulling and rough usage.

“Ah, it wells up in me, stronger and stronger, this unknown emotion I feel for you!” he breathed voluptuously. “It is perhaps nameless because unprecedented, and unprecedented because evoked by your beauty, which has no parallel, and now upsets the standards it has established for itself by entering upon a new phase. For you are different in my eyes tonight. How sculptural you appear in this metamorphosis, with your marble pallor, and the close flutings of your gown disposed about your classically perfect form! You remind me of a painted lunette in one of my own upper rooms, in which the artist depicts a young man lion-ruddy with the hues of health, stretching out his arms in eternal desire towards a young woman that stands in the recesses of a cave, all black and white, and bloodless and perfect, like yourself. ’Tis Orpheus mourning for his Eurydice, gone from him to death. Oh, without question, you are beautiful!”

He hugged her like a bear, he rocked her to and fro till she could hardly keep her feet.

“Now you look like a woman who dies the little death of pleasure, with your lips parted and your eyes fixed in a stare! I fed the strongest disposition to interfere with your fate. I do not want you to recall a rose to that lad, a dove to that man in his thirties, a swan to that grave signor with the pointed silver beard and order in his button-hole. Why, what a universe this is! One cannot mention any of its details without being shocked by its confusion! For do not a rose and a dove resemble each other more closely than a dove and a swan, though those last two are birds? I would transport you to a purer world where things sit more stably in their categories. I would clang an iron gate on you, and shut you in a garden, where there are no coloured flowers, but only tall lilies standing in wet black earth, and no trees save the decent cypress. Ah, my love!” he said, clasping her very amorously, “What pleasure it would give me to shut you away from all the heat of living!”

She wrenched herself away from him, and scuttered to the door, where she stood and looked back at him with immense eyes. “Am I rough?” he enquired, but very absently, for his mob of creditors was pressing in on him again. “You must pardon me, my dear. A man has an inveterate disposition to deal freely with what has once been given him freely.” He waved away the phantoms. “You must discuss this with my secretary,” he drawled, “ay, even you, though you are my wife.” Then he stalked leisurely to Harriet’s side and took the door-knob from her hand, saying, “What, you must go? Well, so you shall.” He tucked his arm in hers and walked her out through his hall, strutting as if they marched to a band, and were under an obligation to amuse. “Now, who could have expected,” he remarked airily, “that the mood induced by utter hopelessness should be so exceedingly like the effect of laughing gas? Not, God knows, that I want to laugh. But there is the same sense of an expanding emptiness inside the skull, the same sense of being a balloon and trying to find a resting-place on the slipperiness of another balloon, all being within another balloon that has escaped the fingers of its holder. Write down this curious coincidence in that little book you keep for things it is useful to know. You have given over far too many pages in it to the addresses of manicurists, considering you have but two hands.”

He had to take his arm away from her to fling open the door, and when it was wide he stood in forgetfulness of her, legs far apart, surveying the empty cradle of the traffic. “Oh, I am thoroughly persuaded of the truth of magic,” he said. “What is waiting here? Not these dark houses. Not these lamps nor the white porcupines of light they radiate. Not the causeway, nor the pavements, that are the gay colour of the put-upon. Not the stars. These are inanimate. There is nothing else. Yet there is something waiting. Why, what is this? Your hand, of course. You are offering to say good-bye to me. Well, if you must, you must. But you need not be so hasty about it. Time was when I should have felt shame at being seen to let a wench out of my house at this hour, but now I do not care. Nay, it is of service to me, for those who see it will know that the hearse which (my mind’s eye shows me) is halted round the corner cannot be for me. But do not think I have lost all objection to irregular behaviour. I shall be annoyed beyond bearing if you turn into a black cat the minute I close the door. You must wait to do that till you get to the area-railings of the next house at least. I cannot have this mansion given a bad name, particularly as, in consequence of what you have told me, I shall now have to sell it.”

She slipped away from him, looking back at him over her shoulder as she descended the steps. Very genially he cried after her, “Well, you must come back some afternoon! You and I, and my wife Ginevra, and the bailiff’s men, shall take a dish of tea together and laugh very heartily over the evening when you called on me and broke the news that I was a cheat and a bankrupt.”

She had passed beyond the trench of sooty shadow cast by the house on the silver pavement, and was in full moonlight when she turned; so that the tail of her gown, dropping beneath her cloak, shone like an angel’s robe, and the hands with which she covered her trembling mouth seemed luminous, and the tears in her eyes might have been taken by experts for diamonds.

“Oh, you need not look penitent,” he called to her merrily, “for I have enjoyed every minute of your stay. You are lovelier than ever, and you have kept your fine shape. Even your shadow, squat though it falls because the moon is at its zenith, has the lines of a Greek vase. Pervasively attractive Harriet! My sole complaint is that you have talked too little. You have not made as many as I expected of those remarks I love to pick up and wear in my button-hole for a day or two and sniff now and then to keep up my spirits. Why have you failed me thus, Harriet?”

She murmured in broken accents, “You mock me, I am never witty. But I own I have been stilted in my speech with you, and I beg pardon for it. But what you have said to me to-night has for the most part been so peculiar to your world, which is not mine, that I have had the greatest difficulty in finding any answers.”

With sudden panic he cried out, “Yes, that is what it was! And why was it so?” He pointed a stiff finger at her, “It is because you are my opposite!” He made motions with his hands as if to beat her away from his home, stepped backwards over the threshold, and slammed the door. He hung on to the handle, breathing hard, and not letting his features loosen from the harsh grimace of hate, till a look of cunning came on him, and he claimed jauntily, “Well, I have excluded her!” He turned about and strolled back through the hall, swaggering like an actor in a costume play, and humming aloud, save when he stopped and shook his fist at the ceiling, whispering, “My opposite! My opposite!” When he had returned to his library he poured out a glass of wine, and overfilled it saying to himself, “No wonder she can read my thoughts! There is no need to suppose magic there. She need but look in her own mind, record what she sees, imagine its opposite, and she has all of me.”

He had not drunk above two or three more glasses of wine before a dizziness came on him, and he had to feel his way across the room and stretch himself on the sofa. “What, am I ill? No, I am drunk! Now that I come to think of it I have been swilling ever since the morning. And it was the same yesterday, and the day before that. For long I have been unable to perform the duties attaching to my eminence without putting that into my mouth which whips my nerves to deal with them and at the same time dulls my sense of how much I am in debt. My body, believing that my mind would some day crown it with the bays of empire, protected it in the taking of its medicine by refusing to suffer the effects of alcohol, and by neither retching nor staggering. No one has ever seen me drunk. But now my body is no longer buoyed up by the hope of power no doubt it will betray me to the people’s scorn; and I shall be known from to-day as a drunkard as well as a bankrupt. That, however, belongs to to-morrow.” He lay quiet for a little, then put out his hand among the cushions. “I am lying among the imprints of her form,” he thought. He rolled one cushion on to the floor but found it too much effort to do more. “That, however, belongs to to-morrow,” he repeated. “Tonight I had better fix my attention on how I am to get to my bed. But do I want to go to bed? It is a terribly defenceless attitude, lying in bed; and even I discomfit the darkness by leaving on my light, I shall not like it when it is the morning, and they come in and find me sleeping and see me before I see them. For I shall sleep, I am so drunk that I shall certainly sleep. What must I do?”

He stared up at the ceiling and asked himself the question many times, until he became aware that his butler was leaning over him. His white face seemed curiously dewed with excitement.

“Will you not come out into the hall, my lord?” he asked

“Why should I do that?” asked Condorex. “I think you are attempting to make me rise before I am able, that you may mock at me.”

“Oh, no, my lord,” said the butler. “I had observed nothing about your lordship’s condition. But I have heard your lordship say at dinner that you do not truly know how many men and maids you keep in this house, and you could inform yourself of that at a glance if you would but rise and go out into the hall, for they are all out there.”

“But what are they doing up and about at such an hour?” asked Condorex.

“Why, since an hour ago they have none of them been able to sleep in their beds for a feeling that something prodigious was about to happen in the house. For you must know,” said the butler with a very sly leer, “that nothing can come to pass in a household without the servants getting wind of it instanter. And now they are all gathered in the hall in their nightgowns and nightcaps, holding their candlesticks to their bosoms with such shaking hands that several of the maids have had their curl-papers singed.”

“Well, I do want to see them,” yawned Condorex. “I doubt that they will be looking their best, and if they were I should not want to cast my eyes on them, since that would only the more vivdly remind me that there is not one of them whose wages are less than six weeks in arrears.”

“If you would but go out into the hall,” said the butler, “you would not think of that, nor would they. For the prodigy they expected is happening.”

“I could wish that the Almighty did not fancy himself as a conjuror and treat this house as a hat,” grumbled his master. “What is the new white rabbit?”

“Why, your lordship, there are three strange ladies descending the staircase, with a rope of flowers in their hands.”

“Oh, those three trulls. I should not trouble my head about them,” said Condorex. “They are but persons out of a fairy-tale that was once told me by a woman in a garden. Not but what they have their importance, of course. The ancients called them the Parcæ and respected them greatly. They are leaving the house because I have omitted to make obeisance to some antique religion. It all seems fiddle-faddle to me, but apparently the ladies have influence, for the upshot of the business is that I am ruined, ay, absolutely ruined!”

The butler’s face bent lower over him, it began to change in texture; and when the change was completed it was apparent that it had taken place because a curtain of dream stuff that had hung between them was lifted. This real face bore a lustrous expression, as of one who has obtained by stealth information which greatly pleases him, and though he must cancel his pleasure for a time does not mind, since he will laugh over it so very loudly when he is by himself. Words came from this face that were harmonious with its mood: “My lord, I think you are not yet awake! I said nothing of ladies. I did but ask if there was anything more I could do for your lordship to-night. Tee-hee! Tee-hee!”

Condorex kept his eyes fixed on him, thinking, “It is extraordinary that I do not mind having made a fool of myself, but of course it does not matter now. I do not mind conduct that might lead to loss, for I have lost all I can.” Aloud he said, “No, there is nothing more.” In a cool and airy way, as if this were the path by which his thoughts mounted when they were inspired, he told himself, “This man did not hate me till my brow-beating of him that hot afternoon when I was confused by Harriet’s knowledge of my plans. ’Tis her doing. Yet I do not blame the poor slut. She cannot help it. Such things must happen because she is my opposite. Ay, they will happen, so long as she lives.”

V

H
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spoke to his image in the mirror above the mantelpiece, as he was apt to do nowadays when he was alone; for otherwise a feeling came upon him that there was nobody in the room, not even himself.

“It is a strange thing,” he began, and broke off to wonder, “Is this mirror my own or have I sold it? I know there have been great transactions of late to which I am a party, but at the moment I cannot remember whether they are concluded. At any rate my reflection is my own. Ha! That is an asset they cannot rive from me.” He picked up the broken thread again. “It is a strange thing, the pleasure one can draw, in the most disadvantageous circumstances, from knowing what is a secret to the vulgar. I will own that on going down to the Cabinet meeting this early afternoon, and passing the posters which cried out again and again, ‘Fall of Mondh,’ I felt a certain gratification because I was aware that they announced the piece of news quite other than that the consternated city imagined. When I tipped my hat to the crowd which had gathered round Downing Street to give me that dreadful croaking which betokens loyalty to the unfortunate (I am a sinking ship) I had much ado not to point my stick at the newsboy who hawked his wares on its fringe, and explain, “Ladies and gentlemen, you have misread that notice. You think it means that the pearl of Asian hill-towns, Mondh, has been invested by the enemy. Believe me, you are wrong. That town enjoys, and ever shall enjoy, the supreme impregnability of a cloud. As soon shall the twilight he stormed, as soon shall the governor of sunset give up his keys. The placard concerns only myself, who am the first Baron Mondh, and who am fallen. ‘Good day, ladies. Good day, gentlemen. If you do not pray the Lord to have mercy on my soul, I shall pray Him to let you rise in the world, for I am not so genial as has been claimed in the public prints of my own party.’ And I preened myself again, on passing back to my house in the late afternoon, at knowing the catch behind the placards which announced ‘Relief of Mondh.’ I lolled back on my cushions of my Chimborazi-Mecklenburgh, which is, so far as I can see, the last automobile I shall ever own, and which I own, indeed, in a highly technical sense of the word, since I have never paid for it, and laughed to realise that those placards referred to another subject than their fellows shown earlier in the day. The Mondh that had been relieved was not myself but the city, which had never been in peril. I am most certainly still fallen. Without a doubt I shall soon go from the Cabinet. It is a most disagreeable law of human affairs that only those things can be saved which have never been lost. Only those who have been born to family and fortune can ever raise themselves above the danger of obscurity and pain.”