Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (9 page)

“I do not carry a muff because I am vain,” answered Harriet, “but to preserve my hands. They are, as you know, my sole treasures.”

“Your sole treasures?” he asked in mock rebuke; and indeed he had been reflecting that he had vastly underrated the perfection of the details of her person. “What, when you have those feet, that nose, those eyes—”

“I do not play Bach with my feet,” she retorted mildly, “nor Mozart with my nose. But let us talk of you, for truly you are looking so well that it is subject-matter for quite a long conversation. You are looking remarkably well! And how glad,” she said, with naïve surprise, “I am to see you! I did not think I should be half so glad. Come, let us walk in the Italian Garden for a little. It is over there behind those railings that are made taut green ropes by their overgrowth of ivy. I go there out of kindness now and then. And now tell me all. Are you very happy?”

“Nay, I cannot tell you anything,” he said, “until you have first told me how you can be kind to a garden by walking in it.”

“Why, look around you!” she bade him, with an air of quiet common sense. Obediently he glanced round them, smiling foolishly, and in contentment, at the pavement of stone flags where they were about to walk, and the lily-pad tanks that were sunk in it, all having its rectilinear design reinforced by the straight line of snow that was ruled on the shadowed side of everything. “Is it not indeed an Italian garden? And Italian gardens that are laid out in England are invariably soured by disappointment, for they have the same romantic expectations which are found in the hearts of all women who, though born under our skies, have yet exotic appearances. Have you not often heard a black-avised woman say, ‘You know my grandmother was an Italian,’ and seen her eyes turn hungrily to the door to make sure if the stranger newly come through was not tall and fair as the fortune-teller said? It is so with Italian gardens. They hope to one man that they shall be the stage for a life as like opera as makes no matter. This very garden dreams without end of being the scene of a duel between husband and lover in doublet and hose while a fair and dishonest wife clings to an urn and climbs up and up the scale. Well, see who are here. Nurses and children, dogs and their owners; and a dog is the very antithesis of opera. A cat would get the idea in ten minutes, but a dog would never cease to ask, ‘Why?’ and that is a difficult question to answer when it concerns opera. Look to whom they have raised a statue! To Dr. Jenner! Though I am bound to say he looks not out of harmony with the place to-day, for he has plainly gone mad in the night. See how he sits and muses on a lapful of snow. For these reasons I make a point of coming here every now and then and walking up and down as if I had lost my lover, and I do not think I am mistaken when I say it looks happier by the time I go. But, dear Arnold, do not let us talk nonsense any more. Tell me all that has happened to you.”

“I wish we might talk nonsense for ever,” he said wistfully, and looked about him. They were standing now by the curved balustrade where the two nymphs with cannon-ball breasts sit knee to knee and pour from ample-bellied urns invisible waters which, falling to earth, become the Serpentine. He had a great desire to ask who these nymphs might be, and hear the little liar tell to what great Whig families they had belonged when they were flesh, and why they had taken to a life of stone. It seemed to him that he needed a fairy-tale as a starving man needs food. But how to fit all in with the Holyhead train starting when it did? He could but sigh. Some alteration had come on his spirits, for now it no longer seemed to him in the least a matter for congratulation that he had what he had and had not Harriet. But he reflected that did he lose what he had and come to Harriet she would grudge no effort to subdue his grief, and he was glad that he had chanced that afternoon to walk in Kensington Gardens, for it had meant something like the finding of a loving little sister that had been hidden from him far too long. His gladness grew to an ache in his heart and tears in his eyes, as she slipped her hand under his arm and squeezed it very kindly. “But I do not want to speak of myself,” he said, “for I want to hear news of you. Do you still live in Kensington?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered earnestly. “I would not ever move from Kensington. I adore its decay and its gardens. It is like a cracked tombstone with a lilac bush bursting from it. But you, I suppose, have moved again and again, and always up and up.”

“Indeed,” he told her frankly, “I live in Albany in comfort so much greater than any beginnings gave me any right to expect that I thank my God every morning I awake and see my curtains being shaken apart. I have been very fortunate; yet I do not believe I shall think myself half so fortunate as I have been thinking if you cannot say the same to me.”

“Oh, I do well,” she said indifferently, “I am a servant in a good house. So many people come to see my masters, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest, that someone will always be needed to answer the door.”

“I have seen your photograph on posters outside the Queen’s Hall,” he said.

“I have seen your photograph everywhere,” she said, “and heard many speak of you, and always well. Old Sir George thinks highly of you.”

“Sir George!” He laughed, like a growing boy who finds the schoolmaster that last year towered over him is this year down by his shoulder. More than a few notables seemed like that to him these days.

“Do not laugh at Sir George,” she warned him quickly. “He has lived to be very old, and no one has ever talked of taking away the honours he was given when he was young. But I have not gone only by what other people have said, I have made my own investigations. Do you know that I read every word of your great speech on the Fortress of Mondh?”

“You did?” They exchanged a foolish smile. At a distance of even five paces one would have sworn they were still in love. “Sitting on the floor? With one hand on the carpet, and the arm curved like a scythe?”

“Ah, you mock at me,” she lamented. “I have told you, ’tis no affectation when I sit like that, ’tis because of my poor eyes. And I had a concert the day before, and was as blind as a bat, yet I read every word!”

“And what did you think of it?” asked Arnold, with an eagerness which was absurd, since he knew that Harriet was very silly.

She sighed reverentially. “It reminded me,” she said, “of the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

“You mean,” he enquired, “a certain spaciousness?” She nodded. “Ah, yes,” he agreed. His eye travelled across the grey glass of the Serpentine to the limits of the prospect, to the dark web of the elms by Rotten Row. Reverie appeared to claim him. “’Twas by that speech,” he remarked, in that sauntering tone by which men disguise themselves when they talk of what seems to them the height of portents, “that I first attracted the attention of Lord Sourdeline.”

“I am not surprised,” cooed Harriet.

His lids drooped still lower over his pupils, which were bright with pleasure at what they had seen on the horizon. Yet more casually, yet more slowly with his lips curved as if the syllables tasted like caviare, he said, “I am going over to Ireland to spend Christmas with Lord Sourdeline.” But suddenly his face fell, he looked down on Harriet with the greatest possible concern, and cried, drawing her close to him, “And you, my dear, have you arranged yourself a good Christmas? You are not going to be alone?”

They had stopped by the edge of the lily-pad tank that is in the centre of the garden, and is shaped like a rose. She looked up with eyes as solemn as a prayer-book, yet he knew she was laughing at him. “Ah, what is Christmas, for one who lives alone like me?” she asked. “I shall arise at my usual early hour, and I shall let out the cat. Ah, gentlemen like you do not know the importance of the part played by the cat in lives like mine! Then I will take my little besom and sweep the snow from my steps, for I am neat; and after I have had my simple breakfast I will sit down and practise my trade for fear that by neglecting my fingers this day I will go hungry some later day. And towards noon,” she droned, “I will take a china plate from my dresser, and I will carry it alone to the pastrycook at the end of the street, and will bring it domed with a dish-cover, tarnished and with a loose knob on the top, very miserable-looking and streaked with a meagre slice cut from a bird communally roasted for the very poor. ’Twill not take me long to eat it. Not long enough. Then, for my second course, I will take from a paper-bag one of the tragic mince-pies of the very poor, that is a deal of wan pastry to two currants, a lean sultana, and a smear of sweetness. There were two in the bag once, but I ate the other on the previous night. That was my Christmas Eve—”

“Will you stop or shall I throw you to the lily-pads?” he asked. But indeed she could say no more for laughter. And he was laughing too, and looking on her very tenderly, for he could not conceive a prettier way by which she could have informed him that he could go on his pleasure with a light heart, since her pleasure was already bespoken for her, and yet given him no grossly actual detail on which his jealousy might get to work and make bad blood between them. “And they will be very happy,” he sighed to himself. “After dinner they will sit together in one of her great chairs before the fire, and they will drink champagne from the same glass, and she will not want to drink it, but will plague him to watch the shining bubbles. Ah, deary me, deary me!”

She shook her head at him, but smiled; and she withdrew one hand from her muff, held it on a level with her lip, arched her wrist, and looked obliquely at some trifle of time-keeping that could be seen so between her wrist and her glove. The movement was of the order of silken contortion that a cat uses when it washes itself, and he could not bear it when it was followed, as, of course, it would be, by a cry that she must instantly be gone.

“Stay a little,” he said, “for you must not go until you have told me what you are.” She smiled with her accustomed good-humour, and he shook his finger at her. “Nay, you cannot smile this away! I am in earnest. I desire to know what you are, for I am sure you cannot be what you seem. You seem a little slut, but no one loves little sluts as I love you. I think you have some value above your seeming. I suspect you of being the embodiment of some principle, of having behind your head or under your feet an invisible scroll bearing the name of some quality such as the young women in the mural decorations of some public buildings are prudent enough to display visibly? Are you love? Are you truth? You are not justice, though you might be mercy. Are you poetry? Or are you philosophy?”

She made him take the hand she was offering in farewell. “Write me down,” she told him, “as all that Arnold Condorex rejected.”

One whose occupation it is to rise in the world has need to cultivate an art of dealing with rebuffs which is not less complex than the art of fencing. It has its tierces, its glizades, and its parries, though these consist not of action but of its negative, being affectations of such various degrees of insensibility as will make the assailant feel that he has scored no point and aroused no resentment; and all these he had mastered. He believed that he was turning on her a front as calm as a marble bust of a mayor in a town hall. Yet on the instant it was not his hand that was holding hers but hers that held his, and she cried in a voice that remorse had made more like a woman’s and less like a nymph’s than he had heard from her lips before, “How I have hurt you! And how noble you are, to be so hurt by your fear that you have hurt another!”

It was all outside the field of reason, and nothing that he had ever intended to occupy his time with further. But he found himself choking, and the snow-powdered landscape lost form and ran before his eyes like a sadly-coloured fragment of stained glass, as he said, “Why, Harriet, I have always been a little hurt for this very reason that I feared I had hurt you! Are you sure you do not think that I have offered you some slight? For I have never felt easy in my mind about the end of that very pretty day we spent together in your little house, when you were so kind and so beautiful. It seems to me that when we walked together in the garden after tea I said or did something that made you think I held you lightly; and that I was not very clever about dispelling your rightful indignation. And then—and then—”

He stole a look at her, and would have been glad enough if she had interrupted him; but that she did not do, though she patted his hand very amiably. So he laid the flat of his hand to his brow and stammered on, “—and then strange things happened before I sailed for India, which did not mend the matter. I had most odd fancies, for which there could be no foundation in the world. I believe I must have been mentally distraught, for they were the flightiest imaginations conceivable. Indeed, I had a right to be not quite myself at that time, for I had worked too long with Lord Derrydown. ’Twas like living by favour of a whimsical sheep. But, dear Harriet, can we not come to an understanding over this? For, indeed, I love you dearly, and there is no woman I honour above you, and whatever I said to the contrary was but a slip of the tongue that had no meaning. Will you not believe me, my dear?”

Harriet raised her muff to her chin, wagged her head at him over the top of it very gravely, and said, “I do believe you with all my head and heart.”

He answered her with murmurs expressive of satisfaction at her satisfaction. But an instant after she had dropped her muff so that it swung from the cord about her neck, and was holding her hands as if to make him take a present from her, and crying: “Why will you still feel hangdog? Listen, I will tell you all. I will not deny that when you left me the state of my mind was deplorable. I retired to my bedroom and put on soft slippers, as women do when they form the intention of weeping for some considerable length of time, and then found that my situation was more serious than I had supposed, since there was no toffee in the house. For I would as lief not weep at all as weep without toffee. Your sex is greatly to be pitied for its inexperience of that beautiful sense of rhythm and counter-rhythm (not at all unlike the pleasure derivable from a fugue) which is ours when we punctuate our movements of spasm by popping into our mouths those hard yet buttery cubes, and thus restore to our system the natural unguents drawn from them by tears. I could find not a thing in the larder suitable for episodic eating save a jar of sweet pickles; and when I had helped myself to two or three of those I was conscious less of a broken heart than of a weak stomach, I will own I felt very pitiable for an hour or two.”