by Rebecca West
He was saying heartily, “Why, I am very glad, dear Harriet, that you took the matter so sensibly,” when her face, which had been looking up at him as fair and open-eyed as the golden rose he had sometimes seen her wear in her bodice, clouded with disappointment. “You do not believe me,” she wistfully exclaimed. Then suddenly a lightning flash ran through her frame and after jerking high her chin blazed from her eyes. “Ah, I see what it is! You do not want to believe me! Some part of you, unworthy of the rest, takes pride in having incommoded me, and will not permit the better part that loathes to think so accept my assurance. Oh, what perversity, to cling with love to the idea that you have inflicted pain! I will not have it so!” But her gaze, not less suddenly, grew soft. “Why, I perceive that all this time you have been torturing yourself regarding this small business! Again and again you have awakened in these most superfluous hours between two and four in the morning, and said to yourself, ‘I dealt ungraciously with Harriet Hume,’ and suffered a heartache. Oh, my poor sweetheart, my pet lamb, my honey-bird! And I perceive too, that when that heartache wore off as all heartaches do, you turned over and prepared to enjoy complete repose, but were prevented from that pleasure by fears that I must needs hate you for having used me so, and that I might raise my armies against you. ‘Dear God, there is Sir George,’ you have groaned; and thrashed about until dawn. Oh, my poor stricken deer, why do you look ashamed? That is a thought most natural to such as us who had to fight our way towards eminence through enemies. But I will put a finish to all this, I will not let you for another moment canker your mind with pride in phantom cruelties. Listen, while I make the proof!”
Uneasily he smiled, “I do not believe I shall be able to listen to it, for you are looking very pretty!”
She knew his praise of her was not without its viciousness, but her face remained as brilliant under its animation as a daisy under a dewdrop, she was so sure that all would go well when she had had her say. “You must know first,” she told him, “that you have greatly disguised from yourself the nature of the catastrophe that befell us in my garden; for which you need blame neither yourself nor your deeds, since it occurred for no other reason than that I had suddenly been granted the power to read your thoughts.”
Arnold Condorex burst into laughter, so extravagant that it cost him his balance. He would have staggered away from her, had she not clipped his cuff between her palm and her fingers. “Yes, I recall you had that curious fantasy!” he told her, choking with indulgent mirth.
“’Twas no fantasy,” she insisted mildly. “I had that power, and have not lost it. This very day has seen me exercise it unimpaired. Did you not see me, as I walked before you through these gardens, stop suddenly and tremble, like a fish caught up from its pond on a line? It was the hook of your own thoughts that had fastened in my back, so actually that I would not have been surprised had it torn the shoulders of my gown. I knew it was you that followed me, and I knew the thoughts that were running in your head. Come, tell me,” she coaxed, lifting to him a face as bright as a new penny with knowledge of her impending triumph, “did you not look at that pretty little cottage which stands among the lawns and guess that, being silly, I longed to live there in the sylvan way, making repasts of such nuts and berries as are to be found in Kensington Gardens? And did you not very handsomely wish you were the King, and could give me all I wish?”
Roughly he freed himself and stepped away from her crying, “I did not!” and then, seeing the game was up, said sullenly, “I did!” and, putting his hand to his head, querulously exclaimed: “But I cannot see what that proves!”
“Sweet,” she chirruped at his elbow, “hark at the important proof it makes! I am not so temperate in nature as I seem. There are those who have seen me skimming like the wind from some incident that had galled my pride, my hair streaming like a comet (allowing for the difference in colour) from my distracted head, my eyes rolling in frenzy, and my rigid fingers clapped over my ears. I must confess—without regret,” interpolated the little prig, “for I believe it has improved my renderings of Beethoven—that I am not immune from agony. Had I loved you as passionately and had you injured me as cruelly as you suppose, there was and is one figure in your thoughts who would instantly have transformed me to the tear-flecked Mænad I can sometimes be. Ah, my love, are you not fortunate in your affairs of the heart!”
There was a pause before he replied, “I do not understand you.”
Rapt in a vision, she was for the moment not attentive to him. “The intensity of your thought,” she trilled, “makes her visible to me as if we were walking skirt by skirt here on the pavement. I have made all manner of close observations on her. She has as small a hand and foot as mine, as finely arched an eyebrow and as shining an eye, and like me she has no reason to fear had she to take her turn in a gallery of antique statues. Only she is golden as the sovereign our fathers used, and thus beyond dispute outshines me; and she has that majesty I have always known I lack. But am I frenzied at the thought of her! No! Exquisite she is, and she is yours, and I rejoice!”
But Arnold Condorex, or so it seemed, was turning into stone. He repeated, “I do not understand you. You do not speak of anyone I know.”
“Why must you dissemble your happiness to me,” she cried tenderly, “when I mean so well? I will not tell a soul but my cat if you do not want it known. I only speak of it to assure you how very happy I am that you are going to be happy! For I saw all, dear Arnold. I saw the vision of the future which comes and goes at the back of your mind, sustaining you against all present tedium; of the six pearl-grey and soot-black pillars of St. George’s, Hanover Square, and how one day soon they shall be washed by a boiling surf of the mob that loves to see the gentry married; of the interior of that match-making building, that shall be incandescent with white flowers and crammed to the doors with persons of consequence; of yourself, standing so properly at the head of the aisle, no more and no less composed than is suitable for the moment; of her at whose coming all the doves swoop down, remembering that though they have for some time been associated with the Anglican Church they were at first the birds of Venus—”
No lark, shot down from the invisible niche in the skies where it had poised to sing its heart out, was more suddenly silenced than was Harriet then. With her mouth a little open, she stood staring before her at the Serpentine, which now looked very much the colour of a dead fish.
Till then these two had been very snug out there, in the Italian Garden, more snug than it would seem possible for two walking abroad in this world of sword-sharp airs, splinters of ice, and lawns grizzled like old men with rime. Because of a certain warmth their meeting had engendered in their hearts, it was as if a line of invisible bonfires were blazing on the stone flags and were making an alley of good temperature for them. But now those fires were dead. Nothing disguised from them that it was nearly Christmas of a winter that had been murderous to the poor, and that they were standing in the uncabined atmosphere with only a little haberdashery between it and their pelts. This was because another fire had died. Its hearth had been in Arnold Condorex’s breast, and in its time it might have been called loyalty, or gratitude, or nobility, but had now no need for a name, since it was ashes, and would presently be dispersed by the winds and be as if it had not been at all. For if he meant to marry Lord Sourdeline’s only daughter before he went to Ireland, why, then, he was a traitor; a double traitor, since she was betrothed to the only son of old Lord Derrydown.
Striking her bosom with her minute clenched hand, poor Harriet moaned, “I know all, yet I know it a second too late! ’Tis the artist’s special quality and defect!” Faltering, she turned towards the entrance of the enclosure.
Coldly he said, “Let me attend you to the gate.”
Walking beside her with dejected head, he supposed she knew it all; how he had heard from another like himself, who had a firm intention to rise in the world, and had told him with a trading gleam in his eye, that the far-famed golden Ginevra
, whose beauty had been the astonishment of English earth since her seventeenth birthday, had fallen moonishly in love with him after having heard him deliver his speech on his first visit to the Fortress of Mondh, and had these three months kept his portrait under her pillow, where her betrothed’s had never been. She knew, too, he supposed, that the informer had made a winking claim of credibility for his story by saying how it had been garnered for him by his sister, who was employed in some mean capacity about Lord Sourdeline’s household. Oh, God! How resolutely the enterprise took on itself the form of a Hogarthian picture full of the colours of soiled linen, depicting a party of servants armed with weapons of the kitchen, spits and pokers and tongs still daubed with grease, creeping up a backstairs to the fine door of the library; where their master’s noble head would nod over a Latin book until they ran in to gag and rob him! And how infinitely low the informer had looked when he had gone on to say, his eye gleaming as if he had achieved some triumph of vendition in Petticoat Lane, that the Lady Ginevra was by no means as gifted in her intellects as in her person, being very gullible indeed, and that her father could deny her nothing! Hogarth again!
As they went by the last of the tanks, Harriet faltered and was obliged to rest upon his arm. To cover her agitation she behaved as if she had paused to watch a governess who, good creature, was attempting to train the fat boy and girl who were her charges in kindness to the brute creation by throwing bread to the water-fowl afloat there in the shadowed ebony water. “How I admire,” said Harriet with a weak smile, “those who bring food to the birds! It shows that when they begin a walk they know where it will end, which I never do.”
But the governess had turned her gaze on them, and had on seeing the marks of deep emotion on the faces made a long leap through the ether to some universe thickly upholstered with seductions. She became petrified, her scattering arm stiff as a pump-handle, while she considered whether it were better for her charges to continue in the practice of Franciscan benevolence or to be removed at once from the neighbourhood of persons she believed guilty of uncontrolled passions. The manly vigour of Arnold, the singular loveliness of Harriet, suggested to her that if a seduction had indeed taken place it had probably been of a very thorough nature. She cast from her the last dry white flakes with such a convulsive movement that they feathered the convex waistcoat of an old gentleman who was passing by, and with cries of “Come, Andrew! Come Phoebe!” hurried her charges from the enclosure.
“God, this woman is making me conspicuous!” exclaimed Arnold with the natural fearfulness of the male, and by a not too gentle indication of his desire to move swiftly saw to it that she too got on her way out into the gardens.
She faltered, he supposed, because she felt the force of his loathing. For certainly he loathed her, since she had spoiled something to which he had given the most prudent management. He had met the eye of the informer in a most prudent and gentlemanly way, cold, wearily, yet not inimically, and had poo-poohed the whole affair. “I have no mind,” he had said firmly and sensibly, “to present myself as a suitor to a family that would not accept me as an equal.” And against the news that Sister Sukey would soon be here on holiday and might have more to say over a dish of tea he had built up a marble wall with words only technically of regret, saying that he was likely for some time to be too greatly overburdened with duties to be free for social entertainments. If he had later given the informer a letter to the Director of the Department for the Engenderment of Larger Oysters and had himself pressed his suitability for one of those sought after measuring posts, it was but to mitigate the absolute nature of that rebuff.
Ay, there was nothing wrong about his proceedings, present or future, were they but looked at from the right end, which is the further side of the performance. A tree is the most natural and wholesome of growths; but if one walking in a park should come suddenly on an elm that swept the ground with its inverted foliage and raised against the skies roots hung with clods of earth, he would run. Say he had gone to Castle Sourdeline and in the celebrated domed entrance hall with the fluted columns of verd-antique, had first had sight of the far-famed golden Ginevra where she stood between Canova’s Hebe and the Pozzuoli Venus (not now considered genuine, but very fine), and had looked into her eyes with a gaze prolonged beyond the ordinary by astonishment at her perfection, yet sanctified with reverence; say he had later ridden with her in the delicious vales of County Wicklow, but never out of sight of their party, and had danced with her, but had looked steadily on the white and gold pilasters and their rich capitals, and never on the fair and pleading face she raised to him; say he had been quick to act on the first moment he could no longer conceal from himself how the land lay, and had gone to the lady’s father and betrothed and made a manly confession of his feelings, and left immediately, and entered into no clandestine correspondence; say he had never seen her again till these persons were alarmed lest their darling should fall into a decline, and themselves summoned him—why, what would be that sequence of events save the romance of a high-minded young man who had not parted with a pennyworth of his honour to pay for his happiness. If it seemed otherwise, it was Harriet’s infernal witchcraft that had transformed it, and had, now he came to think of it, engineered this whole situation. For he would long ago have married a plain woman with family behind her, and so forfeited his freedom to approach Ginevra, had it not been (though he had not till this moment admitted it) that he could never bend eyes on such without remembering that dusk in the garden of Blennerhassett House, when she had burgled his mind and seen he meant to do that very thing. Damnable witch, she had enchanted him into feeling a sense of loss and shame for what is no crime, but the world’s constant practice, only abused in priggish books, like the laying-out of wealth to usury! God, why do we not burn witches now?
Meeting his eyes just then, for she had turned at the egress to offer him her civil adieux, she grew pale, shuddered, and jerked up her chin. It was as if a flame licked her bosom and threatened the pretty face of which she was so vain. She looked away from him to the Gardens, to the near glade where several hardy children of the russet-apple kind scattered abroad among the trees while one of their number pressed its face against a trunk; at the near lawn where five fat terrier brothers rolled tipsily in the sherry of the winter sunlight. When her gaze came back to him she seemed to be turned to stone by her wonder that those simple things could be on the same earth as his thought. Therefore he kept it very clean in his mind while he raised his hat and left her silently. He would show no mercy to her whom he now hated so much that he could not speak. Let her burn. Let the witch burn. For she had come between him and every human being’s right not to know quite what he is doing.
III
YET it was he, not she, who constrained their next interview; and yet it was not he, for the day had altered him out of his usual self. That day was arid. No rain had fallen in England for five weeks. In the country the deepest dell had lost acquaintance with humidity. In grottos and fountains plants that had grown to think possessed of moisture as a property languished in desiccated forms as different from their usual aspect as age from youth. The appearance of the town, though masonry does not wither on its stem, was not less desolate; for at the end of every vista hovered a sinister presence which seemed to be shaped by malignity out of dust, and that dust ruddier and more inimical to man than is found in London. It was as if the genius of the Sahara, hearing that drought had of late extended its empire to this island which had seemed to have water as its constant lover, were come here to gloat. Over the Green Park it stood and mocked at those who had come from their mean homes to seek alleviation there, and finding the air they had trusted to be cool, hot as a fever patient’s breath, the grass they had trusted to be lush, repellent as some old ragged carpet, fell into postures not less fatigued and tortured than they assumed on their own hated pallets. Where Bond Street and Grafton Street are joined it waited for those pedestrians who laboured up from Piccadilly and told them: “Did you
think yourselves fortunate that you are not as others are and do not have to work in the heat of the day, but can parade at your leisure this alley lined with vanities? Well, then, enjoy your fortune! What, will you not? You reel, you put your hand to your head, you call a vehicle! Weaklings, I fear, weaklings to a man!” Did one open one’s mouth to gasp for air, this genius was with one in a trice and forced its hot harsh immanence within one’s throat, as lion-tamers place their heads within the jaws of their broken beasts. Did the wind one had prayed for blow at last, it was not before the presence had bitted it and bridled it and used it as its steed.