Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (7 page)

Yet surely his dream was phrensy. When he came down to Blennerhassett House that afternoon with a stack of roses from a truly magnificent florist (he had begun to spend his money with the recklessness of one about to make a great fortune or to die) he found Harriet very pretty, and a trifle silly, and as comfortable a companion as one could wish. Prattling not too intelligently about India and elephants and Nabobs’ jewels, she fiddled about her garden cutting lavender-flowers till the basket she had slung on her forearm was full, and then fluttered indoors to put them on her windowsills to dry; and then she sat behind her silver equipage and gave him very good home-made scones and country butter, and giggled a great deal. Looking on the suavity of her face and the meek pliancy of her form and manners, which were such that if one found her in one’s way one might surely pick her up and loop her round a hook on the door without encountering physical or mental resistance, he said to himself, “It must be that the other night my intellects were disordered. Certainly there is as little sinister in my Harriet here as there is in drinking sugared tea out of a pretty cup. She could not read my thoughts. I doubt if she could read her primer.” But something tender in him, that same part which had before the mirror designed to buy her a little ring for her little hand, rebuked him. “Whatever happened last night, whether it was magic or the dropping of an ill-considered word, you betrayed to her that no woman is as much to you as the prospect of rising in the world, and you betrayed it in an ugly hour, and in a roughish shape. Decidedly you have brought no good fortune to the girl. For only yesterday she was as kind to you as may be, and to-day you tell her you must immediately sail for the Indies. You cannot say that you have treated her handsomely.” At that he could not help but fall a-moping.

Just then Harriet, smiling like a doll, raised her hand to her head and withdrew the sole pin that held in place her Grecian knot; and the sleek serpents of her hair slipped down over her shoulders and covered her bosom, their curled heads lying in her lap. In but one neat, fluent movement she again compressed its fineness and impaled it; but not before he had called himself a fool for thinking that the loss of a lover could mean much to any creature so rich in all the most seductive attributes of her sex. With an easy conscience, therefore, he rose to his feet and bade her good-bye; and remained in a state of cheerfulness until, when he was re-entering his flat in the Temple, his hand left the latch-key sticking in the lock while his chin sank on his breast and he stood staring very stupidly at the door. It had occurred to him that if she had read his compunction for leaving her so soon and so abruptly she could not have devised a prettier and kinder way of relieving his mind. Yet of that action, though it drearily assumed in his mind an air of complete probability, he thought not as one usually thinks of pretty and kind things. When, once across his threshold, he vehemently slammed the door, the vehemence was because he imagined himself slamming it on the prodigiousness of Harriet Hume.

II

N
OT
till six years afterwards did Arnold Condorex see Harriet Hume again. It was nearly otherwise, for within two years from their parting his footsteps were led to the door in the wall of Blennerhassett House, and it was sheer singularity, of a kind that he blushed to remember, that forbade him entering it. ’Twas at the time when the Powers were revising certain matters to do with Asian frontiers under the eye of Geneva; not the least of which matters was that eternal source of discussions, that litter of cockatrices, the Mangostan Treaty. It had annoyed Mr. Gladstone in 1878; and it annoyed the Secretary of State for India in our day not less, perhaps even more, because at least Mr. Gladstone appears (from his speeches) to have known what or where Mondh was. Mysterious Mondh! How came it that it was the very pivot and keystone of that monstrous Treaty which casts a longer shadow across Asia than Mount Everest, yet was not marked on any map nor present in the narrative of any traveller? Such was the question that the India Office was gloomily addressing to its own bosom. It might have seemed more profitable to address it to the bosom of a Mango, but that was purely a theoretical possibility. For the sake of the British Raj no white man must ever admit to a Mango that he does not know everything. Once the secret were to leak out, the insolence of the Mangoes at present studying law and mathematics in this country would become unbridled, and there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Middle Temple Hall and Cambridge; and from Mangostan disloyal expeditions would set out for Moscow, which certainly would not be able to do anything with them, but ought not to be encouraged even by that much. For these reasons it caused inexpressible joy in the India Office when it was credibly reported that a certain general on the retired list of the India Army had been heard, during his last visit to the Oriental Club in 1912, to say that he had once spent a month in Mondh; and that he was still living and resident in South Kensington. Immediately the Secretary of State for India had summoned Arnold Condorex (who was by now an expert in Far Eastern affairs and had been transferred to the India Office with such a magnificent transcendence of normal processes as took Elijah up to Heaven) and bade him to hasten to pluck the secret from the old man’s mouth.

It was on his return from his errand that he found himself at Harriet’s door. By then it was the burning afternoon of a dog-day; the shadows on the pavement were blue as water. Yet he had thought he would walk a part of the way home, just the length of a few squares and crescents. For the general’s house had been a sealed cube of age. The butler who had opened the door had looked past Condorex with as much suspicion as his enrheumed eyes could hold, at a knife-grinding machine that happened to be standing in the road; for he himself had witnessed the quarrel between the knife grinder and the Friend of Man that Canning writes of, and he felt too frail to deal with anything like that nowadays. The general’s daughter blushed and turned away her face as she passed him on the stairs, so long was it since any human being outside these walls, save only Debrett and Burke, had known of her existence; and he knew she had this very day formed a dreadful resolution that if nothing happened in the next thirty years she would dress herself all in white and fling herself from the Italianate tower which gave a romantic finish to the villa. The general himself lay frog-cold in a room as hot as a Turkish bath, and was not truly alive, but caught in the hinge of the door between life and death, and groaned as it swung to and fro and let others in and out, but never him. After being in such a house it seemed good to move one’s limbs and sweat, and also Arnold wished to walk that he might think, and even talk aloud, if he wanted to do so. For he had a matter to settle with his conscience.

From the end of the first half-house it had been plain that the old gentleman’s memory had betrayed him, and that his experience was not of Mondh but of Pondh; poor, unwanted Pondh, whose conspicuousness on the map amounted to a kind of looseness, since it was not once mentioned in the Treaty. Would he advance himself if he returned with this information? Would he, indeed, be advancing the cause of the British Empire, of civilisation, of peace, were he so almost rudely honest? The situation could surely be dealt with more helpfully by an exercise of the qualities which make a good secretary. His own convenience and the higher ends of man would be subserved by a certain slight adjustment of the facts, with no harm to anybody save the raising up of difficulties in the path of some secretary in a position like his own fifty or sixty years hence; and he regarded the destiny of a secretary too highly to shrink from provoking the incidents which are most characteristic of it. Raising his eyes to the sky, which was a deep and unsullied blue, he said in a clear voice, “Let Pondh be Mondh.” No feeling of regret rebuked him; and he continued on his way at a pace remarkable on such a warm day, wondering without resentment and even with discipular piety who had been Mr. Gladstone’s secretary in 1878, until he was struck by something familiar in the aspect of the wall by which he was walking. A pretty green creeper ran half the length of it, and at intervals drooped pale waving tendrils a fore-arm’s length down into the street, so that it looked as if a harem had drugged their eunuchs in a body and had stolen to the confines of their prison to have their fingers kissed by a queue of lovers. He came to a standstill, and addressed them very amiably, for he was now in excellent humour: “I have known you, my dears, when you were not half as well-grown as you are now, and far more discreet. In those days your little hands reached no further than the top of the wall, where they used to flutter very appealingly. I have seen the same performance in boarding-schools where the pupils stay late into their teens. I said as much, I remember, to someone….”

And someone, he remembered also, had giggled. Someone had been Harriet Hume. This, then, was Blennerhassett House, which he had not known because he had approached it from the opposite direction to that he had come from when it had seen him nearly every day, two summers before. And here, a step or two further on, was Harriet’s door, which he had often had to pause before in order to compose an aspect that he knew to be disordered by the excessive beating of his heart. It was newly painted, a tasteful green. The minx must be in funds. With a reminiscent smile he decided that he must try his luck and see if she were at home. For all of Arnold Condorex’s advancement had been earned by his talent for negotiation, and with none could he negotiate more successfully than with himself. He had dealt with his own soul most ably on this matter, begging himself to forget that and to remember this, to let that go because it had a sharp edge and would draw blood whenever it was picked up, but to keep that because it dovetailed with this or that to make a profitable whole. So now he thought of Harriet Hume only as a creature lovely as a swan and mild as milk, trim in disorder, prim in amorousness, a personage in the world because of her talents, and a little goose to those who knew her well; with whom he had been fortunate. It had served him to remember that, because it had made him confident with women. And there had been, he had it written on his present mind, an awkwardness on the day of his good fortune, since by some slip of the tongue he had betrayed that he thought more of his advancement than of her or any other woman in the world. It served him to remember that, because it had made him careful with women. And he had not really lost much by his awkwardness, for it had been but two days later that he had had to sail for India. It had served him to remember that, because it had made him believe in his stars. Because of these selected memories, and because the last two years had given him much evidence that he could win nearly everyone to be his friend, he laid his fingers without reluctance on the handle of the door. Surely Harriet had been the gayest person he had ever known. He burst out laughing and said to himself, “Egad, I will tell her I have made Pondh Mondh,” thinking of the transaction much more merrily than he had thought but a few minutes earlier. But immediately his fingers fell to his side, because he perfectly knew what he was going to see when he opened the door.

The garden was not changed. It had still, in spite of its partition, that air of being a corner in a wide and rolling park; and it was still, as a town garden should be, less an exhibition of flowers than a green sanctuary. And it was not empty, any more than it had been when he frequented it. In the shade of the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley was a deck-chair of yellow and white striped canvas, on which he was sure, though its back was turned to him, there reposed a young man enjoying the liberty of shirt-sleeves; for there dangled beside it an almost bare arm obviously belonging to a male. The down on it, he thought sombrely, were one to approach near enough to see it, would be fair. A book and some weekly journals lay on the grass by the chair. He made himself at home, this young man, whoever he might be. Indeed the afternoon seemed to be passing here so pleasantly that the mouth could not help but water. For nearer the centre of the lawn was a light iron table pierced by a giant dust-and-orange umbrella, the same as may be seen on the terrace of any French hotel, and by this stood Harriet, looking infinitely ductile with contentment.

She had not lost an atom of her innocent loveliness. She was very much the same in her appurtenances also. For she was wearing, as she had always done, a parchment-coloured gown that showed her shape to the waist and then became a thousand pleats of fine muslin; and it still seemed incredible that there should be a grown woman’s feet in those tiny sandals; and at her bosom she had pinned, as he had seen her do a dozen times when she was in a good mood, her favourite rose, an open-eyed and golden flower with a grainy brownness at its centre, exhalent of honey. The only novelty about her aspect was her peasantish broad straw hat which she had pushed back until its elastic was strained low across her throat, and it hung like a great O behind her shoulders; yet that was not so novel either, for it had seemed to him that he had always been aware that she would look just such a melting dove of deliciousness if one hung a peasantish hat like a great O behind her shoulders. Of the same dubious truth it was that he had never seen her do exactly what she was doing at the moment; which was to look down into a tumbler and swirl it round and round, because there was sugar to be melted and she, the lazy slut, would not run back to her house for the spoon she had forgotten. Yet, if he had never seen her do that, how did he know so well that, though she would not run back to the house in her own interest, her little ankles would twinkle up the steps to her French window in no time had it been he who held a glass of her lemonade in his hand and had need of a spoon?

In fact, she was unaltered, and she was exquisite. But can the semi-sacred charm of familiarity, can true delight, attach to that which has been apprehended by a process other than natural? He retreated a pace from the door, regarding it with loathing. Surely it is established as firmly as any article of our faith that the only occasion on which a door is not a door is when it is ajar. It has no license to be a lens through which the unseen can be seen, it has no permit to tamper with time and exhibit that which has not yet been encountered. Addressing it in firm tones, he said, “I will not trouble to go in, on such a fine day she will not be in town,” and passed on, bending his brows again over the business of making Pondh into Mondh; a transaction which he never admitted to a soul, neither with laughter, as he had meant to admit it to his Harriet, or in solemnity.