Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (25 page)

He was walking along the road by now. Automobiles spun by him, but that did not dismay his sureness of his case. “Ay, they are moving,” he admitted, “but do you not see how this paralysis of the spiritual will would operate? All would continue as it was at the moment the curse fell. The trees that were bare and had been jilted by the wind at that moment shall stand stripped and forsaken forever. That man and woman who sat so heavily pondering whether it could not be put out to nurse with Aunt Emmy at Portsmouth and none be the wiser shall squat there till eternity be sent down to the butler’s pantry to be cleaned. And that which was moving shall perpetually be confined to its notion. See how that poor sentinel walks up and down in front of the classic colonnade of the Powder Magazine across the road! Without cease he shall trot up and down that moonlit oblong, his fur busby covered with a second fur of moonbeams, with not a chance to stop and use his good bayonet to kill. (Oh, I must hurry, I must hurry!) And these automobiles run by me because they were so doing when change was annulled and therefore cannot stop. No doubt they were in Leeds or Salisbury when the devilish work began, and before it is done with drive down into the sea in search of rest; and when they have done that, poor souls, they will not find peace, for they will find themselves obliged to drive and drive under the waves, and those ground swells will make bumpy roads. Oh, the infernal pull of opposites! I must end it without an instant’s delay.”

He set himself to a trot, and had but time to bend his neck over the Serpentine Bridge; but what he saw made him shake his head gravely enough as he jogged on. “Ay, there has been abolished order. That is shown by the destruction of that division between human beings, which confined one to little fiddling activities which are but one disguise worn by obscurity, and exalting another of more grandiose make to appropriate grandeur; for I, even I, am threatened with obscurity. And here I see there is setting in a further confusion of substance. That was not water underneath the bridge. It was black and hard. It was marble, or agate, or onyx. Those images of trees, those smeared replicas of light, they are very different from reflections on water that has not been tampered with; they were as markings on rare minerals. Oh, have I not seen man-high vases of such stones in the palaces of Italy and fatuously admired the cities and lakes and forests in their depths,” he groaned, “and never guessed that these commemorated times when the lovely living earth was petrified by the foul action of opposites! For so it must have been. Yet, God knows such horrors are exceptional.

Water is for the most part truly water, and reflections have behaved gracefully like ladies dancing. The spell sometimes breaks: though doubtless not of itself. Oh, I will not be dismayed though the moonlight looks far more like rime than itself on the grass beneath yonder groves. There are victories to be gained,” he panted, “if the hand is but steady enough.” He went on at a jog-trot until he saw the lights that march along the southern border of the Park, and waved to them gaily, crying, “I told you we should meet later! For I have had a curious notion all the evening,” he said, wagging his head, as he came out of the Park gates, “that my walk would in the end bring me to Kensington.” And certainly he stood on the earth of the Royal Borough. Some of these poor doomed automobiles that would before long spin their wheels among the fishes had to go by before he could cross the road; and while he waited he eyed with a sneer the stiff snake of light opposite that marked the street down which he meant to go. “It descends a considerable hill,” he said grimly, “Kensington lies very low, for all its gentility. Its boasted squares have indeed the quality of a lilac-bush bursting from a grave.” He laughed aloud.

“Lights, lights, there are too many lights in this street,” he grumbled as he trudged, getting down into his collar. “And for all the vastyness of these houses, how little true majesty they have! They are quite comically without the importance of my own part of the world, where we are all statesmen. Owing to this accursed confusion of substance they look in this moonlight very like enamelled tinware, and that with their design gives them an exact resemblance to magnified jelly-moulds. I do not think that persons of the highest consequence would ever live here. Yet Sir George had his residence here, I seem to remember. Ay, that is what I mean,” he gibed. “It is just the place where Sir George would live. But does he live anywhere, or is he dead? Oh, I should have known if he had died,” he told himself bitterly, “from the long and fulsome obituaries. Everyone would speak well of him, for he was high-born and exceedingly rich from the beginning.” He tramped on, thinking no thought in particular, but blanketing his mind with a general hot close-weaved disposition of hatred against his fellows, when at his elbows he heard a gentle scuffling sound, and wheeled about. There in the coign of a porch and an area-railing he saw a meanly dressed boy and girl who, perceiving how the night permitted nothing to stand sharp and separate but fused all in darkness, were so doing with their lips and arms and bosoms. “Faugh!” said he. “Faugh!” But they did not hear him, and though they drew apart it was not to pay him attention, but to confirm the wonder that, God knows why, they felt at the sight of each other’s very ordinary round eyes and snub noses as amazed at life as puppies’ muzzles are. “Tck! Tck!” he said, as one who sees a practice that, persisted in, will wreck the State, and strode along, till suddenly he plumped down on the steps of a great house as if he had been a gipsy and cared not a thing for appearances. “My feet hurt,” he whined. “It is years since I walked so long a way on pavements! And ought I not to run back and tell these two young people that they are opposites, and what the end of it will be? But they will not believe me. The beginning of the business is very enjoyable. Ah, is it not, is it not! Oh, I must go on if ever I am to save us all!” Up he picked himself, though he seemed to weigh half a ton and to be another person, and he set off on his jog-trot again.

But soon he gasped, “This street, I do not trust it! It is very long. Good God, it is unnaturally long! I am afraid it has swung loose into the ether, and that I am walking not along the earth but at right angles to it, and presently shall come to a thin knife-edge of macadam, and shall thereafter find myself floundering up a rungless ladder in the skies. I shall go on scrambling up it for ever and ever, and shall not come to anything. Oh, I am going to be lost in space as well as time if I cannot find my opposite and put an end to these schemings! Do you not see how the aspect of this place confirms my intuition? The Sir Georges and their like can live in these great houses because they have family and fortune which act like weights to keep them down to earth, so that they shall never fly off into space, no, not if they so wanted. But these lights that stretch down the street show what will happen to one who is not weighted down by these convenient leaden pellets, if he stray here; for they go on and on and on, and are very low and of a very ignoble degree of radiance as if they would lead him into infinity and obscurity! Infinity and obscurity! That shall not be the lot that falls to me!” At that he struck his bosom very violently. “Where is my opposite! I must find my opposite! For that is the road I must tread, if I do not deal with my opposite I But hold! Is that not a very familiar corner over there? Is that the side-street I must take?”

He ran across the street hotfoot. “Ay, this has a look of it,” he muttered, and rubbed his nose against first one pillar of a porch and then the other to see what number was painted there; and when it appeared there was a one craned his neck backward to read it on the fanlight. “Eighty-three,” said he. “Eighty-three. ’Tis odd that I cannot remember if it was at Eighty-three I used to turn off the damnable street; and odd that I should forget so relevant a number, when I have had at my finger-tips the figures of population that the last two India Office papers on the subject have ascribed to Mondh. And I fear that nothing regarding the City is likely to be of much service to me henceforward.” He loitered about the pavement, biting his nails and looking up and down the street, not knowing what to do; and presently, looking from the corner down the side-street, caught sight of a small white dog sitting on its hunkers in the gutter under a lamp-post, very busy with what it was doing. From further along the street came the voices of a man and a woman, crying together, “Tray! Tray! What are you doing?” to which the dog looked up with a leer that said very plainly, “For two pins I will tell them, if they do not hold their peace”; for he was a very low kind of dog, a fox-terrier such as seems to be wearing a cloth cap, and to be at home in gin palaces and wherever the fancy are found.

“Why, little dog, you look to me very much like an omen,” said Condorex, and waited.

The man and the woman who were calling the dog stood side by side, stockish and alike as brother and sister might be, at the foot of steps leading from a house of less pretensions than those in the broader thoroughfare but of respectable appearance: and from the open door behind them an old voice creaked, “Andrew! Phœbe! Will you not come in and get your father Paris on the wireless? For there is Dean Inge at London and one imitating the noises of little children and farmyard animals at Daventry, and you know your father has the gout.” And the two turned and cried, “Yes, when we have found our little dog! We must not lose him the very first day.”

“Ay,” said Condorex. “The pieces are fitting together at last. I am sure that I am where I wish to be; for these people inhabit the same dream of the Creator as my opposite.” He walked past them as they stood calling in their clipped honest voices, “Tray! Tray! What are you doing?” and with a slanting look saw them knitting their simple sandy brows as they stared through the darkness. “That such guileless things,” he jeered, “should be a guide to truly important business! Not that I am there yet. It is round the corner. Dragons and dangerous things have twisted passages to their lairs. Ay, see where we are!”

For there, across the road, was the long wall of Blennerhassett House. The bare strands of creeper waved from it like the fleshless arms of the long dead; and the moon shone bright on the brass handle of the door.

“Is this not peace?” he sighed, crossing the road at a leisurely pace, since there was now no need to hurry any more. “What peace is like an accomplished ambition! But what is this?” He stopped in the middle of the highway.

For though there was now, owing to a rising wind, a marble screen of moonlight clouds pierced here and there with windows giving on to the pure stuff of night, and though the macadam beneath his feet shone like dark glass, there were other things than these and the stucco fronts of Kensington before his eyes. It seemed as if a high hill lifted its shoulder against a sky that was diamond hard and dazzling as Northern skies are in the night, and did so a second time in a round lake at its feet, whose smoothness was ringed by circles fine as the lines about a woman’s neck. The waters of the lake lapped and sobbed among the sedges at its rim; and a sound of bells came from the darkness at the side of the hill. They were all saying one thing, the sky and the hill and the lake and the bells. They were saying, “Harriet Hume is here, she is ours, she is here.”

But he shook his head. “Nay,” he told the lot of them very resolutely, “You are wrong. For she said to me I had the gift to have supernatural knowledge of her as strongly as she had the gift to have it of me, would I but exert myself; and in such a universal crisis as this (for indeed I consider it no less) I do not scruple to use it. And it tells me very plainly that she is here in Blennerhassett House. I would wager the fortune I hope to have if all goes well to-night that when I open that door I will see the light shining through her sitting-room jalousies. The rest of the house will be dark, I grant you, for society has long lost the freak of resorting to this dismal suburb for its amusement: but Harriet will be where I wish to have her. Wait.”

He laid his hand on the door-knob; but before he turned it he had to stand still and laugh into his fingers for a second. “I cannot help but be entertained,” he chuckled, “when I think how she herself instructed me in the plaguy secret of this loose knob, and bade me never forget it. Well, she cannot say that I have not obeyed her.” He held back for an instant to make another matter clear. “The light will be coming through the slits in the jalousies,” he predicted, with his forefinger on his brow, “and in a great beam at their middle, for the jade has left them a little open. Now for it.”

It was exactly as he had foretold.

“I have hitherto disdained to use your resource of magic,” he said coldly towards the yellow window, “but you see I am nearly your equal in it. Well, I need not hurry. I have you trapped. You cannot leave your house save by this garden. I will see you the minute you show yourself at the window, and if you turn down the light and run for it you will perhaps regret the ardour with which you have confused all substances you can lay your will to, for against the white sand you have made of the moonlight on your lawn, your floating form will show with an admirable distinctness. Since all the cards are in my hands I can afford to take my time and arrange to enjoy the play better by taking a thorough survey of the setting, which upon my soul is uncommonly pretty for such a factory of mischief as this has been for me.” He cast his eyes about the neat groves and parterres, the wrought-iron gate that threw its lyrelike shadow on the grass beyond, the shrubbery that was so gracefully disposed about the foot of the iron steps to the house. “This ingenious garden has still its air of being a park,” he owned in grudging accents, “of being genteel and harmonious no matter how meanly it is partitioned and surrounded. And there, I perceive, stand the ladies Frances, Arabella, and Georgina Dudley. Hold now, I would look into their state.” He strode hastily across the green to them, glancing over his shoulder to see that no advantage was taken of his distraction; she must not get away. He inspected them as carefully as the trees in the Park. “I had thought,” he murmured, “that she might have left one dead leaf or one bud in her own garden. But I see that her carefulness has taken no chances. Heigh-ho!” He turned away, though not before he had said icily to them, “You do not seem to have greatly bettered your estate by leaving my house, your ladyships. But you are doubtless under just such an enchantment as myself. Well, that will be soon broken, I can promise you.”