Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (2 page)

But where had that birth, so beautiful, albeit destitute, been accomplished? Though he knew Harriet so well and had taken more than a brief period of time to arrive at this knowledge, he knew nearly nothing about her, not even where, in the widest sense, the sense of class, she had been born. At times he had thought he had discovered that she was native of a class far above his own; but not more often than he had thought she had betrayed an origin almost comically lower. It was odd that he had felt on both kinds of occasion a sudden exultant emotion, as if what he had found out had given him an advantage over her. But as he had never been quite sure what class he had belonged to himself it was natural enough that he should be confused about such matters. He bent over the book-case, which filled a recess between the fireplace and the French window, to see if it would give a hint of what kind of education she had had. But with the most perfect finality it contained no books: not one. Music it was that stuffed the shelves, save for the lowest shelf of all, which housed one week’s issues of the
Morning Post.
At that he laughed aloud, half at the memory of the way she read them, half at his knowledge of why she read them. For Harriet suffered from a disorder of the sight which could not be corrected with spectacles since it fluctuated with her strength, so that a struggle with March winds or an hour’s excess of practising would leave her sand-blind. Therefore, as it often happened that she was a little tired, she usually read her newspapers by spreading them on the floor, squatting tailor-wise at their edge in the pale pool of her skirts, and leaning her weight on her hand but very lightly, just so that her arm curved from shoulder to wrist in a scimitar shape, in order to move easily when she came to a column’s end. Squatted thus, she peered down at the print with her eyes narrowed between immensely long eyelashes, and her sleek head veering back and forth, back and forth, to find the focus, though it looked as if she were nodding time to music that only she could hear. And she went to all this bother and disturbance of her neat room, solely to learn more of the friends her early fame had brought her. “Why, old Sir George is really a great man!” she would cry. “He carried the Commons with him yesterday on the subject of China, on which (I must confess) I thought him such a bore only last Sunday among the lilacs!” Most people are pleased enough when their lives can be counted as illustrative notes in the margin of what the world decides to commemorate in print and are overjoyed when they are incorporated in the main text; but to Harriet, dear fool, that text could at most be a footnote to her own life, an amusing appendix to the vastly more important things that happened when she played the piano, bit into an apple, was hot, was cold. Arnold Condorex liked that about her reading, liked it as much as the sight of her waist rising straight from the watchspring she made, when she sat thus on the floor, by the neat coiling of her legs. ’Twas not for him to find repellent a disdainful and triumphant attitude to the world on the part of those who had been born with no silver spoon in their mouths.

Liking a pompous phrase from time to time, he muttered: “… as little human history as a nymph,” and turned away, but stepped back immediately, for there had caught his eye, from behind the stoutness of the telephone directory and the turtle-shell cigarette-box that lay end to end on the bookshelf, three bars of Russian leather that might as well be the tops of photograph-frames. That indeed they were, and he made to pick them up but stopped himself, since one must not be caught prying, and instead brushed aside the directory with his right hand and the turtle-shell box with his left, and looked at the photographs where they rested against the wall behind. The midmost photograph was of a house, a stone house, a farmhouse, perhaps, or a lonely parsonage. No look of county about it. No drive. Patently no gardeners kept. No, he had long come to the conclusion she could not be of very high condition. But a good place, a clean place, as places are in the cold, clean North. That it was there could be seen from the background, which showed hills checkered with dikes to a height that only insane northern industry would climb; and in the foreground the roses were plainly climate-curst. Surely the first night they met she had said something about Cumberland. A grim place for Harriet to live; a grim place even for the woman whose photograph was on the left, though one could see that her handsomeness was stiffened with a buckram of moral purpose that her daughter lacked. Yet to be sure the elder was none the worse for that, since if Harriet had a fault it was that her oval face was almost insipid with compliancy. Yes, this woman was very handsome. What a life she must have lived all her days, shut up in that hole at the world’s end with the man whose photograph was on the right, a bearded creature pretentiously austere, overblown with patriarchy, as avid for opportunities to raise a hand to heaven to bless or curse his children as a prima donna for arias. It would be very gratifying to go to a lonely village and stumble on such a superb woman. He heard through her imagined ears his knock on an imagined door; and could see with her imagined eyes his obscured handsomeness standing beyond the threshold in the night. “I beg pardon. I am lost. Can you tell me where I might find a room? Oh, you are most kind.” In an imagined kitchen he stood and quietly waited till she finished her task of putting the chain back on the door, and turned, and saw him; and bade him sit down, and when he was seated ingenuously moved the lamp along the table nearer him, till his handsomeness was wholly within its bright circle. One would not move until she sighed. Oh, to live for ever. There is so much to be done in the world.

Sliding the telephone book and the turtle-shell box together again, he moved along to the mantelpiece and stared at himself in the mirror behind it, smoothing back the raven hair that was apt (there was a Levantine on his mother’s side) to lie over his ears in something too like Disraeli’s locks. Give him a neckcloth and he might have been any of the statesmen who were great when Corn Laws and Reform Bills were all the go. He had the right aquilinity of head which was preserved from suspicion of above-earthness by the square shoulders, themselves preserved from the contrary suspicion of peasant grossness by the lean waist, the temperate hips. Also he had the intense black gaze and the dark pluminess of brows, beetling much for so young a man, that are the very thing, as one has seen in a hundred prints, for thinking about politics in a park under thunderclouds; and he had to a T that ample, marbly Romanness of profile which, would make them think he had written his speech in the library of his place, beneath the cold eyes of the third earl, a bust, and Cicero, a remarkably fine tern. It was a type that would have its day again. People were growing tired of the serviceability that had been the only temperamental wear for young politicians during the war. They were ready now to be entertained by wit and floridity; and once they looked to one for entertainment what one would produce in the way of sense had the dramatic power of the unexpected; and if one could enact at will the romantic gesture, so endearing to the populace, of burning one’s boats behind one because of an inflaming principle, one would be safe for life. He pursed his lips, which were full, firm, and discreetly red, ending in two small vertical creases in handsome flesh, as do the cupid’s bows of all the Elgin Marbles; and faced the glass indifferently, not caring if it were there, as five years ahead he would face the Opposition Benches, not caring if they were there. “Oh, I am fortunate!” he thought in a drawl; and suddenly his mask cracked and showed his real face, that was as young as his real years. He reflected how fortunate he had been to gain Harriet, how nearly he had not met her, how kindly she had bent herself to his will, and how little he deserved her.

Tears stood in his eyes. He could no longer see anything in the glass. He told himself that though he had but little money to spend just then he could go out next morning and buy her a ring, and would not need to feel ashamed however modest it was, as her heart would understand how much he loved her and refer its modesty to the proper cause. Not in the least would he mind that she should know how little a way he had travelled on his path to fame and fortune; he could even imagine owning to her how ridiculously few dress-shirts were in his wardrobe. Sweet Harriet, she would take any secret he gave her, fold it neatly as if it were a fine linen handkerchief, and pop it inside her bodice between the little mounts that were indubitably a woman’s breasts yet did not prevent her form being very childish, and there it would lie, safe as a packet at the Mint; and while she wore it so her face would look at the world with an expression of the most nearly universal benevolence and the most gallant obstinacy, as if she were saying that she would give it anything it wished save only that. And at the thought of how pretty she would look then, and of how little the ring would have to be to fit her finger, he felt a serene contraction of the throat, and two tears had to be dealt with by his forefinger. “Dear Harriet! Dear Harriet!” he muttered, and liked to see his handsomeness taking the words out of his mouth in the mirror. Yes, he was fortunate in that his handsomeness saved him from being too painfully outstripped by her in beauty. Yet still she was too good for him. He choked, thinking of ways he might try to deserve her.

It was then that the whine, of the hinge grew loud enough for him to hear; and on turning his head he saw that Harriet was standing still in the doorway with a tray in her arms, and had, he guessed, from something rigid in her attitude, been rooted there for more than an instant. Immediately he felt, perhaps because there was something witch-like in the stooping of her slenderness over the weight of the tray, the coldest apprehension regarding the feeling which had held her so and lit a most perplexing brilliance in her face. She was, of course, as blooming as every woman is when a man has just proved that he loves her; that is to say, a fairy masseuse had patted her flesh into delicious infant contours on the cheekbones and had shaped her lips into a smile suited to approval of nothing less than divine conditions and left them bright as wet paint, as the bitten meat of cherries. But over and above that bloom she wore a radiance that had been but newly applied, and stood taut with a tensity derived from some galvanic force that still electrified the air about her, and had not been dissipated by time at all.

She was, he saw, about to speak. But on the explanation of what had happened to her he waited with no joy at all. For so soon as he had found himself surprised he had been taken in charge by that most miserable part of him which believed that the whole world was furtively deriding one Arnold Condorex and which ascribed to derision supreme power over the universe, against which love and justice might range themselves in vain; and it whispered in his ear that what had transfigured the girl could be nothing less than this omnipotence of mocking laughter.

Blackly he moved to take her burden from her, and was about to say, with a stiff laugh, “Well, you have caught me looking in the glass,” when she said happily: “Well, who would not, left alone in a room!” and then cried out, as if she had been hurt, “Oh, I was not laughing at you! Arnold, how could you think I was laughing at you!” She ran beside him to the table, clinging to his sleeve with both hands, and as soon as he had set down the tray pinned herself to his bosom. “What have I done that you should think I would laugh at you and think meanly of you?” she asked piteously; and looking down into her wet eyes he knew that he was a fool.

“Why, nothing,” he said, and gravely kissed her. “It is only that I am sometimes black and bitter and that …” What he had in his heart to say was that in his journey up from sordid God-knows-where he had had to overcome so many ambushed memories that it was not surprising if his fretted vigilance saw enemies everywhere. But it was hard for him to admit even to Harriet how long and hard that journey had been; and Harriet relieved him of the need to, for she nodded her head and patted his hand as if he had already confided in her. “But tell me, dear, has anything happened to you? When you stood at the door I had the queerest notion that you were so excited about something that you were going to burst out singing, or laughing, or crying—”

“Oh, yes, something has happened!” Harriet told him; and drew away from him, solemn and open-mouthed with wonder, very much as she had done by the window on the balcony, not so long before. “You will not believe it! But you will have to believe it!” Then she looked a little disconsolate, as if she had divined that though he might believe it he would not like it. “Let us have tea first!” she begged rather sadly; but smiled brilliantly under her lashes, as if she thought that she would lead him to it, and it was not in human nature after that first amazement he should not like it.

Nor was it in human nature not to like the meal, to which her little wrists moving about the tea equipage gave the air of a doll’s tea-party. Of the two cups and saucers on her tray one was India red, and the other that pale blue which Victorian ladies used freely in their water-colour drawings of the Bay of Naples, and she offered him his choice between them; and bade him speak if he liked to drink his tea out of any other colour, for there were four more of the harlequin set in the china cupboard. Fondly she asked, “Will you not have another, my dear?” though there are no dairy Falstaffs who push excess to the point of the third
egg;
and she had opened for him a new pot of the quince jelly and the apple jelly flavoured with orange, though only the other day he had heard her lamenting that such conserves lose their flavour almost as soon as they are exposed to the air. Tenderly he reflected that her little head, which was almost egglike in its oval blandness, was as full as an
egg
is of meat with the desire to please. But for that his shrewdness rebuked him. There must be much else besides. She had mastered the shining black leviathan that just behind her proclaimed Bechstein its parent. Like him she had crawled up the dark tunnel which leads from obscurity to the light, and had performed the feat more expeditiously. She must be in league with formidable forces, he reflected with sudden gloom, if her fragility could carry positions one would judge impregnable save by the heaviest artillery. If that were so, would it not be certain that she despised him, and that the illumination to which he had been subject at the door was an explosion of mocking laughter? He pushed away his plate.