Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (6 page)

They had completed the first part of their promenade and had now turned their backs on the dark house, but it was no more pleasant walking this way than the other. She had to cast her eyes down on the ground so that she did not have to look at the three trees which she had named the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley, for now she could not bear to think that she had told him a fairy tale. It is the special hardship of women that it is their destiny to make gifts, and that the quality of their giving is decided by the quality shown by those who do the taking. No matter how full their hearts may be of tenderness and generosity as they hold out their gifts, if the takers snatch it without gratitude, then the givers count as neither tender nor generous, but merely easy. Indeed Harriet had not meant to be easy, but she was not fool enough to refuse to see that this evening had proved her so; and she felt that the proof lay more in her having put herself about to entertain him with a piece of fancy than in her having made certain other disclosures which might have seemed more important.

She bit her lip; and beside her Arnold Condorex’s mind growled that she was not being fair to him. No man on earth would ever surpass him in appreciation of her peculiar quality; would more ecstatically know her bland as a runnel of cream from the lip of a jug, and at the same time so wild and ethereal that she could not be the product of the tame human womb, but must have been begotten by a god in a wind-tost grove, and then again so primly perfect that she could not be the product of the crude human womb, but must have been worked by the finicking human hand, like fine needlework or old silver. No man on earth to whom she made benevolent concessions would in his soul more immediately have doffed his hat and gone down on his knees, sensible that he was in a church. But a man must rise in the world! Dear God, did she not understand? A man must rise in the world! Despair swept through him as he realised that certainly she would not understand; and it became absolute as he realised that neither did he truly understand it himself. He would have been far better pleased had it been his intention to stay faithfully with his Harriet till some force that could be honoured parted them, rather than to betray her for a Privy Councillor’s plain daughter, whom for some reason he now saw as a large and raw-boned English sheep-dog.

Yet the latter intention was unalterably a part of himself. He could no more remove it than he could uproot his own breath. Why should he be so welded with a programme which, in thinking on it, he felt he did not in the least relish? Could he veritably care so much about the duty to rise in the world if he was capable of such hearty longing to act counter to it? But with a groan he realised that he cared for nothing else. It dominated him, he was its instrument. There might have been a vast superior spirit which had invested him and was so much greater than himself that its loins sprung from his shoulders, and it used his whole body as legs to carry it about on its business of rising in the world. Yet even if that were so, must he lose Harriet? Could he not keep her with a lie? But, great gods, now she had this power, he could not lie to her. Nay, at this very moment, she must know that he was debating whether or not he might successfully lie to her!

Looking from side to side in his distress, he noticed that they were at that instant passing the door in the wall, and he most heartily wished he might wring her hand in perfunctory farewell and dash for it, leaving for ever this garden that had become accursed. But he had left his hat and stick on the sofa; and it was a presentation stick. The trouble of getting it must be accomplished first.

“I will fetch them for you,” said Harriet, and started towards the door.

He said, “Let me!” But over her shoulder she gave him a smile that was not unkind, and yet was proud enough to forbid him to persist. No, indeed, he could not thrust himself again into the rooms he had desecrated. He watched the pale figure pass through the settling twilight, and perceived that she was carrying herself with the straightness of those who feel themselves utterly bowed down; and he covered his face with his hands.

When he could bear to bring them down again she was standing in front of him, his hat and stick dark against the pallor of her gown. She laughed tenderly, as if she had found him playing a game familiar to them both, and murmured, “My love, you must go now.” To judge from her bearing all might have been well between them.

“My love, I must go now,” he echoed hoarsely. They looked long at one another. It struck him that they were exchanging glances of more agonised sincerity, more desperately truthful reference to their mutual regard, than they would have shared had they been parting as true lovers. Could not something be done with all this honesty, with all this acute sense of each other’s being? “Oh, Harriet!” he cried. “Can we not—? May we not—?”

She grew very still. Her head drooped, so that through the more than dusk he could not see her face at all. A bird sped across the sky above them, croaking some monstrous tale of avian disaster, but she did not look up at it. A freshet of wind stirred her skirts, but she did not smooth them. It might have been that she had died on her feet and was being upheld in air by friendly sprits till one came who had loved her most, and had the right to lay her on her bier. And indeed, as Arnold Condorex well knew, she was telling him that, so far as being his loving mistress was concerned, she was dead.

“Ah, well!” he sighed. “So must it be!” He put out his hand and took hers, and raised it towards his lips, and said solemnly, seeking her eyes through the darkness: “May God bless you and keep you wherever you may go, for being so kind to me this day.”

She answered him in his own words: “May God bless you and keep you, wherever you may go, for being so kind to me this day,” and raised her mouth to his.

They were as a Greek vase, he the sturdy vessel, she the scroll of ornament wound round him. But that vase was shattered an instant after its making, when he broke away from her inquisitorially, to know if, when the music changed in the damnable club beyond the wrought-iron gates, he had wondered whether he danced well enough to acquit himself to the pleasure of the Privy Councillor’s plain daughter or should take lessons. Had he not wondered that? It seemed as if he had not, for her face was smooth as junket in its bowl. He had not thought it then, but, by God, he was about to think it now! He cried out, “I must leave this place!” and turned blindly towards the door in the wall. It did not in the least assuage him that she sped beside him, guiding his blindness, finding the latch for him. For he felt his intention to rise in the world like lead in his bosom, and he knew she must know it was there, and must know that if he stayed another instant he would be snarling at her in his soul, blaming her meanly and unjustly for this clairvoyant power, though well aware that she had come by it through pure accident, and had lost as much by it as him. Was there no end to the nastiness in his brain-pan?

Now he was out on the pavement. From the darkness behind him she cried gaily, “Fare you well, and mind you are not late for his lordship,” and slammed the door. He leaned against the wall, drew out his handkerchief, and passed it over his brow, which was wet with sweat; and stood awhile and groaned. What an end of a gallant adventure! Was it possible that he could be really a good secretary? And had her voice not broken on the last few words?

His brow was not indeed truly dry until a later hour that night, when the unusually affable greetings of Lord Derrydown made him conscious that he was confronted with one of those occasions when, by being useful to the great, we can advance nearer to that blessed time when they are useless to us and can be scorned. He became himself again. Assuming the meek and serviceable aspect of a retriever, he listened while Lord Derrydown informed him that that evening a crisis had arisen in high places which he, and he alone, could bring to a happy conclusion. It was, of course, known to all that a tour of our Eastern possessions was about to be performed by a certain personage of high rank, whose mind enjoyed the pellucidity of an ideal Italian sky. Not enough matter was ever present in it to mar that dazzling vacuity by a single cloud; and while this state of affairs made persons who sat next him at banquets invariably describe him as delightfully simple and unaffected, it created a less favourable effect when it was revealed in the course of oratory. It was, in fact, a case where a competent secretary was not only desirable but indispensable; and one such had long since been engaged. But at the last moment—it was horrible to think how near the time of embarkation—the worst had been discovered concerning his habits.

His habits, repeated Lord Derrydown, and he drooped his blue and wrinkled eyelids to show shame and horror. Arnold Condorex did the like with his, thinking without mercy, “The old fool looks like one of those sheep’s skulls that one finds lying on the downs.” His lowered gaze fell on the dispatch-box that was relique of this master’s tenure of the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, and he knew a spasm of desire as urgent as any he had ever felt for a woman. “God, had I but family behind me!” came from his breast as if a harp-string had twanged there; and was followed by a richer and more swelling note. “But listen! That has begun which promises you shall do very well in spite of your low birth!” Barely could he control himself sufficiently to go through the proper motions of raising his eyebrows in surprise, and of rolling his pupils from side to side in modesty, as Lord Derrydown went on to explain that when the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State had consulted him as to how they might best fill the sudden vacancy, he had named, and had been conscious of extreme self-sacrifice when he did so, his own secretary as a person of sterling ability and no habits, no habits at all. His heart cried out in rapture, “The old fool has offered me to the Prime Minister as a bribe to cozen him to do the Archbishop of Canterbury’s will and wreck the Bill for permitting a man to marry his grand-dame by an amendment that it will apply only if she be of crooked stature and swarthy and there be no likelihood of pleasure in it. I am right, then, about my own quality!” Scarcely could he knit his brows, protrude his lower lip, bury his chin on his chest, and make the other adjustments of his countenance necessary for his impersonation of a devoted servant downcast because his master (to whom, God knows, he would deny nothing if he could but choose) had asked a service almost impossible for him to perform; so high was his soul soaring, and so loud was it singing, “I am rising in the world! I am rising in the world!”

Then a misgiving came on him. It was as if one, sitting in a fine room he had lately furnished and preening himself because all was well and all was paid for, should see between two of the floor boards a dark pool trickling. Where had he been infected with this monstrous doubt that rising in the world was not the supreme good? Why, that very night, along with some other very disagreeable happenings, in the garden of Harriet Hume whom now he need not see again. “In two days! Sail in two days!” he exclaimed, echoing the old fool’s words. But prudence alone made him speak as if he were appalled; for if a man must buy his outfit for the East and do much other official business in two days, then fitly he may say good-bye to a lady, with whom in any case he has exchanged no serious vows, by telephone.

Yet that was not how he said good-bye to her, though, God knows, that was how he tried to do it. Panic prevented him. For several times the next morning he gave her number to the dark capricious instrument, but it became no channel for the sirop of her voice and continued to make its own animal noises. On the fifth occasion he said to himself, “This is strange, for at this hour she is usually at her piano,” and then the sweat stood on his forehead as it had done the evening before, when he went from her gate. During the night his will, having no fancy for what had happened on the previous day in Harriet’s garden, had been busy unpicking the stitches which sewed together his recollections, and had left them in loose pieces round his brain; but now they seemed bent on putting themselves together in the same abhorred shape. For was it not that Harriet was able to tell through her new clairvoyant powers that it was he who caused her telephone to make its angry pheasant-whirr; and for that reason was now sitting still upon her stool, her hands suspended above the keys of the piano, her mouth trembling as she wished that he who had ruined her peace yesternight would leave her quiet to-day? He groaned; and immediately knew himself a fool. For calm fell on the growling in the ebonite, and little Harriet said “Halloa” as cheerful as a sparrow. Oh, he had dreamt all this about clairvoyance. She gave a great many “Ohs” and “Ahs” to his great news, and seemed to understand most amiably that he had no time to pay a farewell visit to her, and tittered very prettily when he spoke of the previous afternoon. “All’s well that ends well!” said he, putting down the instrument and sitting back in his chair.

But had it ended well? He started forward because a dread had pinched him that all was very ill, that he had veritably witnessed a suspension of the proper order of nature, and that he had trodden a flower to the ground very brutally because of it. For had she not answered the telephone only because her sight into his thoughts had told her he was suspecting why she did not answer it? He snatched up the instrument and again gave it her number; and the instant after he and she knew that most abstract form of confrontation which happens when two people stand with receivers to ear and transmitters to mouth but do not speak. “If my dream be true and no phrensy,” he thought wildly, and with cunning, “she will say ‘Yes, you may come to tea to-day’ before I have asked it of her,” but there was silence broken only by such a faint noise as a mouse might make, not knowing what to do, until it struck him that she knew he was putting her to this test and was at her wits’ end to guess what was wisest, When he rapped out his request aloud he had a frightful sense that he was making it a second time, and that she acceded with the patness of one who has thought a question over.