Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  Harriet Hume

  Rebecca West

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  I

  THEIR feet, running down the wooden staircase from her room, made a sound like the scurrying of mice on midnight adventures; and when they paused on the landing to kiss, it was still in whispers that they told each other how much they were in love, as if they feared to awaken sleepers.

  But it was the afternoon that came in by the high window on the landing, and it was amusing to swagger back into the daylight, challenging it to punish one for having been where one had been. So he cried aloud: “See, Kensington goes on! It has been waiting for us all the time! It has been threatening us!” And certainly the aspen which laid its lower branches across this window seemed to be delivering some testy message by tapping on the glass with its nearer twigs. “It is saying it will get us yet! It is warning us—oh, look what is warning us!” His right hand left her waist and pointed to a gap in the foliage, where dancing leaves framed a triangle cut from the line of houses that lay beyond the garden wall. There could be seen of one house the dumpy windows of the “best bedroom” floor, which sunblinds made seem like three stout maids in green calashes waiting to put their mistress to bed. There could be seen of two houses the six tall windows of the “drawing-room” floor, opening on a balcony balustraded with the key-pattern in cast iron, to show that here England had met Greece, and that the introducing party had been the Victorian era. There could be seen of three houses the sturdy pillars of their porticos, varnished black to make a handsome harmony with the saddened primrose of the stucco front; their dining-room windows, broad and slightly protuberant, like the paunch of a moderate over-eater; and their stockade of area railings, boasting with their lance-heads that there were points, such as the purity of cooks and the sacredness of property, concerning which the neighbourhood could feel with primitive savagery. And for base of this triangle was the grey pavement in front of three-and-a-half houses, on which there now slowly stepped, from behind the screen of dancing leaves, a fat papa, no slimmer for being in a light summer suiting, a fat mamma, a deal less slim for being in flowered summer trailings, and a fat little boy and a fat little girl with bright cheeks and bright hair, who were pulling along by a jointly held lead a fat little white dog, which was sitting down on the ground and pretending to have a solid base. “It is telling us,” cried Arnold Condorex, “that some day we will live in houses like that and be people like those. It is threatening us that some day we will spend Saturday afternoons not at all as we do now, that instead we will go and take tea with Grandmamma so that she can see our little—”

  Suddenly Harriet Hume stood clear of him, her mouth a little open, her eyes bright with wonder as well as her delight in him. “Stop!” Her narrow hand covered his lips so swiftly that though there was no force behind the movement it startled him as if it had been a blow.

  Puzzled, he silently mumbled with his lips against her palm, and raised his eyebrows. Was she going, after all that had happened, to be delicate about what hardly any women were delicate about nowadays?

  “No, indeed,” she laughed, before he had quite finished the thought, and slipped aside her hand that she might kiss him frankly; but slipped it back and continued, “But I think—oh, Arnold! I am sure!—I know the names you were going to say!”

  His eyebrows went still higher and he gently butted away her hand. “What names?” He disliked above all things women who laid claim to occult gifts. It was half way to saying they believed in reincarnation and, when the wind blew from the south, themselves remembered having been Egyptian princesses in their time—ay! and having kept their own pyramid, too.

  “No, indeed!” she said indignantly again. “I make no foolish pretensions, nor ever did, my love!” And she drew him back to the complete approval of her by giving herself again into his arms, by letting the pulse of her profound excitement shake through her lips on to his. “But truly I know the names you were going to say just then, the names you were inventing for those fat children. Suddenly they seemed to be …” She laid her finger between her eyebrows. “… Here … like a patch of headache.”

  Mocking her, he kissed that finger. “What were they, then?”

  “Why,” she cried, straight into his eyes, “they were Andrew and Phœbe!”

  His hands dropped down by his side.

  “Am I not right?” she pressed him exultantly.

  “Right,” he muttered. “It is a miracle!” Awed, he scanned her glowing face. “My darling, that is very wonderful!” But he did not like it. His eyes left her, looked out of the window at the gap in the foliage, though long ago papa, mamma, the little boy and girl, the white dog, had disappeared again behind the dancing leaves. “Pooh!” he said lightly. “I must have told you of this. For I did not invent those names. They were those the curate had bestowed on his young in the village in the Cotswolds where we were taken for our holidays when we were babes, and they have stayed with me ever since as symbols for dull brats. I must have told you….”

  She shook her sleek head. “You have never told me! Why, even as you say it, you are thinking, ‘I have not talked of Lathom Cross for years!’ No, my dear! Of this I think there is no explanation! It simply means that prodigious things are happening to us this afternoon! And why should they not! Why should they not!”

  And with that she threw up her bare arms, clasped her hands above her head, and so ran down the stairs ahead of him. Following her, he marked how her shoulders were so prominent under her long tight bodice of thin silk that they might have been wings folded in on themselves and packed away for reasons of prudence: and thought that if she indeed desired to look an ordinary woman, walking on earth and of much the same specific gravity she had better not have cut her skirts so full, for their swaying buoyancy seemed to be supporting her. At least one could not credit that this was done by her tiny feet, which were so high in the instep and so finicking clear-cut at ankle and at toe, that one could fancy them not feet at all but spurs added as a last touch to a bird-woman built by a magician expert in fine jewellers’ work and ornithology. Of all women he had ever known she was the most ethereal. Loving her was like swathing oneself with a long scarf of spirit. Yet, so far as loving went, how human! He had thought that when she had reached the foot of the stairs, which descended directly into the sitting-room, she would pause and wait for him, to have confirmed all that had been between them by more kisses. But instead she ran across the room to the grand piano, which with the two great arm-chairs and the divan was all it held, and threw open the lid, looking at him and pointing at the keyboard with an air of invitation. In a second, however, she remembered, and saying wistfully, “Oh, I had forgotten you did not play!” closed the piano again; and went to the divan and shook up the cushions for him; and drew the curtains across the bay at the end of the room, for this old house that let her live in a corner of it was over lofty in all its proportions, and giraffe-high windows let in a slanting plethora of light trying to modern eyes that read too much. Since her curtains were of amber taffeta this made her room a cave of bronzy shadow, which the brightness from the windows on the garden side washed softly as water. Then she whisked her skirts towards the mantelpiece, where there were still two tall vases full of the flowers that had been given to her at her last concert, took out a rosebud, ran to him, snapped the long stalk and set it in his button-hole, and went back and found another for her bosom. And there at the hearth she came to rest, her rose-coloured nail toying with the nail-coloured rose, the involved wrist as finely turned as one would have been led to suppose from the carriage of her head (which supported a Grecian
knot as hardly another head in a million), and the stance of her feet (of which one was turned out as far as could be, while the other rested behind it on the very point of the toe, as if she were a little girl at her dancing-class), while her other arm lay like a rod of spirally rounded ivory along the mantelpiece. It was not a pity that her gown took the shade of China tea on the side of the curtained windows and the shade of pearls on the side where daylight had its way.

  “Oh, I am tired,” yawned Condorex, rolling among the cushions.

  “And I am hungry!” cried Harriet; and pointed to the open French window. “Well, see what came when we were giving our attention elsewhere!” On the topmost of the six broad, shallow steps that led down to the garden was the veiled golden brick of a half-pound of butter; a glossy white bottle of milk; a bag full of eggs. They were there because, fantastically enough, there was no entrance to Harriet’s abode. So hastily had the old house been converted to feed the house-hunger that raged after the Great War, so far faster than any fast bowler had the contractor hurled in staircases and partitions of wood that had he left them alone had become match-boxes, that some problems of architecture had inevitably gone unsolved. Gentle and simple, therefore, be they great composer or “the vegetables,” had to find the door in the wall of old Blennerhassett House through which only gardeners had gone until the General’s widow died; had to master the trouble concerning the loose brass-knob; had to pass alongside the shapely groves and extended lawns that had still (for all that fences divided them into meaner spaces) the large formality of a country park to the flagged terrace from which rose these steps to Harriet’s room; and before they could announce their coming must climb to the very top of the steps and run the risk of finding Harriet as she might be at the moment. This was indeed a risk. A baker’s boy from Sussex Place had not been quite the same since he had rattled on the window to learn if he should leave brown or white, and Harriet, seated at the piano in her dressing-gown, had turned on him the face like a skull which she had worn ever since she had woken that morning sick with the sudden knowledge that the way she had always played the Fugato was wrong, and wrong, and wrong again. Better luck attended an old gentleman (K.C., V.O.) who had found Harriet in one of the great arm-chairs, her legs tucked up underneath her, in what would have been decency had she been wearing anything but a chemise transparent with a hundred washings, while she mended her one pair of silk stockings (for these were the terrible years when she was paying for the piano) that she had a minute before plucked from the clothes-horse in front of the kitchen fire; but he, alas, was quite the same after that experience as before.

  “I may as well know first as last,” said Harriet, “do you like your eggs boiled or scrambled?”

  “Boiled,” said he, “four minutes.”

  “We will dip our bread and butter in them,” she said, settling the parcels in her arms as if they were a baby.

  “It is wrong,” he said.

  Over her shoulder she asked him, “Can we strain at a gnat after swallowing a camel?” and the kitchen door closed tartly behind her.

  He closed his eyes; but it would be a mistake to fall asleep if in five or ten minutes she would be bringing in tea, for he was so drowsy that he knew wakening would be painful unless he slept for hours. Heaving himself up, he stretched, yawned “Ah-ha-ha!” contentedly, and hobbled over to shake back the curtains so that full daylight should bully him back to alertness. Then his fingers, which were not troubling to make precise piano movements, slowly felt for cigarettes in his case. They found what they wanted, but he had no matches. But there were always enough of them in the box on the mantelshelf. Harriet’s house was kept trimly enough. And the box, he reflected as he closed it, was a credit to her taste; a very nice piece of Early Victorian foolishness, lacquered papier-mâché sprayed with mother-of-pearl flowers and golden leaves. He sighed, “Poor Harriet!” For it had struck him that with the sole exception of that superb monster, the piano, the little things in her house were all so much better than the big; and nobody knew better than Arnold Condorex, for reasons which could be easily divined by those who had visited his attic in the Temple, what that meant. A carpet so flimsy that it reproduces on its surface the least inequalities of the planks beneath, and lean-arm-chairs and divan on which cushions are no mere luxuries, when they are found in the same room as exquisiteness that can be held in the palm of the hand, trifles of art that cover no more than two inches of table or six inches of wall, means that a bright spirit has been born naked of material inheritance. “Poor Harriet!” he sighed again.

  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 turt
le-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.