Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  He rose to his feet, looking impatiently towards the sofa. “I will turn on some other of the lamps,” he thought. “Nay, I remember that that does not disperse the figure. In brighter light she grows more aery but remains. ’Tis like the tedious character of this house to have a ghost without a name or nature, a mere eavesdropping patch of darkness on a cushion. Well, there is no reason why I should cabin myself with this insignificant slip of gloom. There is no reason why I should not go to bed and sleep. I have made up my mind. I will write to Scorchington with my own hand as soon as I rise in the morning. Heigh-ho!” He rubbed his eyes, and yawned, and stretched, and looked around at the rams’ heads and said insolently, “I will pay all!” Before his mind crowded his moo of creditors; among which, curiously enough, since he owed her no money, he saw the Lady Ginevra as she would be at this hour, dancing at the Embassy, limp in the limp arms of one of her own kind, like two anchovies side by side in a bottle. But she and the rest of them now appeared to him as if discomfited. “God, this is good,” he breathed, “to feel the sap of success rise in my veins again!”

  But the door opened before he reached it; and that pallid sphere, his butler, stood before him.

  For an instant he did not speak, and Condorex knew. “He is thinking something ill of me. He brings news, and is holding it back so that he may consider the worst effect it may have on me, and thus exercise the greatest art and distil the greatest joy in telling it. How I would love to put him to the door! But I dare not, knowing what he knows.” Then his preoccupation tugged him, and he cried aloud, “Is there a message from Lord Scorchington?”

  “No, my lord,” said the butler, and stopped to smile at his master’s disappointment. “But there is a lady who says she must speak to you, and will not give her name”

  “A lady!” cried Condorex. Nay, Nancy of Palace Street would never dare. “Is it not very late?”

  “Past midnight,” answered the butler, “and I have told her so, but she will take no denial. She says she must speak to you before morning.”

  “And did you not put her to the door?” raged Condorex. “You know how night and morning we are beseiged by the witless, that were kept seven years in Nottingham Asylum for no reason, that have recognised in Ivor Novello their only son stolen from them in infancy by a plot of the Pope, or (and the most afflicted of all are these) that have discovered a new alternative to the gold standard. To which class, pray, belongs this lady?”

  “That I cannot say,” replied the butler, with a kind of composed pleasure, “and I did not like to put her to the door, for though I do not know her name I remember that she visited your lordship once before.”

  “And when was that?”

  “It was about five years ago,” said the butler, “on a very hot day.”

  Condorex slipped his hand between his neck and his neckcloth.

  “Is it Miss Harriet Hume?” he asked.

  “I do not know her name,” replied the butler.

  His breath gave a leap in his throat. “Is she of low stature and not richly dressed?”

  “The lady is very beautiful,” said the butler.

  One end of his neckcloth had come loose: the hand that pulled it was damp with sweat. “Do you think she has come here for money?” he snarled.

  The butler leaned forward sharply, his face more alive than usual; but checked himself, and stood upright again. “Ah, he thought then of something shrewd to say to me!” knew Condorex, fuming. “And I can guess what it was! ‘What—come for money, here, to this house? It is as likely that she brings it!’ How he hates me, and hates me more than when he framed that phrase, for that our positions make it impossible for him to speak it!” And he noticed with sick fear that the man’s dull eye looked past him at the room behind, seeming to plumb how many cubic feet of misery the house could hold if tightly packed with it, while he said, “The lady said that she had come to speak with you on a matter of the gravest importance, my lord.”

  Nonchalantly, as if fear were the note omitted from his range, as if condescension were the only not awful relationship he could have with other human beings, Condorex grumbled “Oh, I will see her! I will see her!” With long-legged strides he strolled past the butler and down the staircase. From a niche the scent of a honeysuckle plant set in a fine jardinière plucked at him like a hand on his sleeve. “So it is Spring,” he mused, “I had forgotten! How ironical is a Spring that brings no hope of renewal save of flowers and trees, that lets the branches of fortune be bare as ever! For I feel this woman’s visit is a most sickly omen for my future. Ah, how softly that villain pads behind me! Is it not monstrous that I, who am counted a great man, cannot turn round in my own house, and go to my room, and shut the door, and sleep, but am marched down to this Cassandra by my most detested lackey. Well, it must end. I will put her to the door, and will go forward with my plans to-morrow, and will grow rich, and being rich I can send him away, for having had debts is no discredit when one has paid them off. Nay, it gives a favourable impression, as of a good man struggling with adversity.” Now he had his fingers on the door knob; and fortified himself before he entered by turning and hissing to his butler as urgently as if he were sincere in his imputation of squalor to the situation, “Do not go to bed! Stand by, lest I need you!”

  At the back of his mind he had promised himself some gratification in being shocked when he saw Harriet Hume at the ravages wrought by time on her appearance, and for that reason he laid his hand on the switch that turned on the sconces as well as the table-lamps. But when the downward draught of pure light fell strongly on the sofa where she sat, it revealed nothing shocking. Though she had come to an age when a day of weeping will forever take away a woman’s beauty, she had not shed those tears as yet. She was still exquisite, though no longer as flowers are, but rather in the manner of ivory, or pearls, or alabaster. Neither did she look to be poor. Her cloak was not such as a woman of fashion would wear by night, since its stuff was merely a fine black cloth, but it was rich and new and clean. “’Tis not that she could not buy herself a proper mantle,” he thought with disgust, “but that, unstabilised by social duties as she is, if she goes out by sunlight she is as like as not to come home by starlight, ay, and as like as not to come home by sunlight if she has gone by starlight, for she is loose, I am sure she is loose. Therefore she must have some garment that will not betray her too grossly as she gipsies among the hours.” Nor was she disordered. Indeed there was spread smoothly on the oval of her face such a deliberate composure as many persons assume on the approach of a thunderstorm.

  He could not despise her for anything it seemed, certainly not for malevolence. That she was feeling neither that nor any other mean emotion was proven by the accord between her appearance and the study where they sat. “Ay!” he said aloud, noting it, and stared very fixedly at her. In this quiet green temple of a room she was as proper as a swan on a lake. Though the vexation of his spirit had long prevented him from taking pleasure in the place, he was still sensible of its benignant quality, and knew that when he recognised it in her eyes, her mouth, her bearing, he was pronouncing her not base. Why had she come? More of this damnable quality! She had come to be kind. Ah, God, was he never to rise above the subject of kindness, was he never to be in a position of power!

  He put out his hand. When her fingers touched his he made a slight grimace, because he had caught himself being aware a second before that they would feel as no other woman’s fingers do, having the texture of coolness and the temperature of warmth. But he said to himself, “Well, at any rate I have forgotten her voice!” and groaned as she spoke, for nothing in the world, not even his right thumb-nail, at which all his life long he had stared whenever he had need to collect his thoughts, was more familiar to him than her meek, ingenuous, and tinkling tones.

  He backed from her, halted and decided to make for the authoritative chair behind his desk, where he could look at her across the gear of his important business. He sat back on the cushions and tried t
o swell a little, and thrust out his chin so that he might stare at her under dropped lids. What she had said to him had not penetrated to his intelligence. Perhaps it had demanded an answer. His jaw dropped, his eyes ceased to hector her face and fell to his desk, and there became fixed on his ink-bottle. “There are those,” his mind told him with an idiot emphasis, “that can see strange things in a pool of ink poured on their palms.” He twitched his head erect again, and made belief there was not sweat upon his brow. “This is bewitchment,” he murmured in his soul, “’tis I, not she, who am behaving as if I were a midnight visitor to an unwelcome house. Oh, God, wilt Thou not absolve me from the hideousness of circumstances that I anticipate comes to its climax in this hour?”

  Harriet said in a little voice, “I suppose you think me greatly wanting in discretion to pester you at this time of night?”

  In irony he answered, “It is an honour, it is an honour.” His voice humbled him by wavering, but mercifully her cloak had slipped from her shoulders and exposed her form closely moulded in a white gown of a Greek fashion. He was therefore able to enjoy that sense of being at an advantage which he always derived from admiring a woman’s beauty in detail; until it struck him that she was as still as though she sat for her picture, and his heart cried out, “She knows what I am thinking! She is letting the poor fool find what solace he can in the ridiculous position of being an open book which another can read at will!” Each of the three occasions when she had mortified him by her accursed gift flashed before him, and he recognised wearily that he was remembering them exactly as they had happened, without any disguises that would make them less wounding to his pride. “I have lost power to negotiate even with myself!” he thought bitterly.

  Harriet said quickly, “I must explain to you that I come so very late because I have been playing with my comrades at a rout given by the Countess of Pavane and Schottische.”

  “I am not asked then,” he said with a sneer.

  “You are fortunate,” she told him with a trilling placidity like a canary’s. “One would not consort with any of the women there unless one had brought some article of furniture that claimed Queen Anne’s as its period, for if any remembered having seen it in her girlhood one would know it for a very early specimen; and they have wisely married husbands somewhat older than themselves, so that many of the men clapped each other on the back and swore they had not met since Agincourt. Even …” She ceased for an instant and turned on him a gaze like porcelain in its shining quietude: but he marked that the left globe of her bosom was sensibly shaken by her heart-beat, and was afraid, for he knew what fear she felt would be on his account. “Even Sir George looked not so old among this decrepit assemblage.”

  “Oh, the Lord help us, Sir George! Sir George!” he cried, wriggling in his seat and rolling his head from side to side. “That croaking raven, that un-buried corpse that eats its cake and has it, that has assumed the ghastliness of spectrehood without forfeiting the opportunities of tiresomeness which belong to a living old man! Well death never removes what has been his own for more than a decade! So you are still friends? What delectable evenings you must spend discussing me, or what news of me you can scrape together, you with your high occult kind of eavesdropping, he with his ear to the ground eager to catch the steps of young men marching towards disaster quicker than he crawls to his grave! Faugh! I wonder at you, Harriet!”

  “As for Sir George being my friend,” she replied mildly, “I am not sure that he is so to-day. My place in his heart has been taken by one of those counterfeits which old men’s minds invent, and often prefer to the reality. I will sometimes go and spend an afternoon playing to him the Scottish airs, the Songs Without Words, the melodies from Balfe and Donizetti, which he dotes on, and yet draw from him few thanks enough; and the very next day I will hear he has been striking the parquet with his stick and vowing I am the same heartless flibberty-gibbet as all the other young people (for he is so old he thinks me young), and have not been near him for a month. Whereas when I am far away, making music in Barcelona or Warsaw, he will tell his friends that I have taken tea with him that very day, and have never been more lovely and gracious, nor better gowned. He has already travelled as far away from life as that; and this is why—” She laid two fingers across her throat as if to still a pulse, breathed deeply, and said steadily, “he gave me no more explicit warning than he did this evening.”

  “Can you not tell me more directly?” he said coldly, as if she were detected in doing him a mischief instead of a service. “I have recovered my self-command, which I lost at the sight of you, remembering how ill an omen I have always found each of your visits. I understand that you have something disagreeable to tell me. Pray say it as expeditiously as possible.”

  “I cannot tell you as expeditiously as we would either of us wish,” answered poor Harriet, “because I am describing something that happened in the ruins of a man’s mind, and was much influenced by its setting. It is necessary that I should tell you I was late in arriving at Pavane House, and found Sir George in the vestibule, preparing to leave. Among the immense marble columns which support its dome, the tall young footmen full of blood that stand against them, the stout candles in the lustres which carried plump and steady flames that will not be burned out till morning, he looked creaking and transparent like the cast skin of a snake. I went to him with both my hands outstretched, but he greeted me with no great favour, since I was my real self and not the graceful phantom he has made my surrogate. Nay, he faced me very grimly and pointed back his stock to two pictures in the anti-chamber and bade me tell whether, for all the boastings of my generation, there were artists who could paint like that to-day. One was an unmistakably female figure from the rich brush of Mr. Etty; the other was a complete census of an occasion of public rejoicing undertaken by Mr. Frith. I confessed the default of my generation, but he was not appeased. He went on to grumble, very inconsistently, that the women of this age were, on the other hand, furious renouncers of their femininity, who had sacrificed all, even to their bosoms, to ape the men, and on the other hand wantons who made the whole earth their mattresses. There was no health anywhere, it seemed. As for politics …”

  She turned the white arch of her neck aside and spoke to the parquet, as if nothing else were there. “… Why, they were now a filthy business, and he blushed to think that he had spent his life tinkering with them. Ay, and they were like to grow filthier still when this pother with that friend of mine was finished. God, what would the mob think of the governors at the end of that.” I asked him, what friend of mine he meant? He rolled his old eye, blue and dilute like soapsuds, and weakly clicked his tongue against his palate, and made sounds drier than the rustling of dead leaves by snapping his worn fingers, yet could not call the name to mind. But it was the tall fellow he spoke of, the very well-built young man, who was a close friend of mine. Why, only the other day, the old man said, he had come into my house and found a man’s black silk scarf on the table, and had rallied me, and I had cried, ‘Oh, this belongs to—’ oh, plague on him, he could not call to mind whose I had said it was, but I had named this man he thought of now; and I had picked up the scarf and tied it round my neck with a neat bow under the chin, like a cat’s. Then, Arnold, I was sure it was of you he spoke, for that I did, fifteen years ago, with a scarf of yours.”

  “Did you do that?” he asked drowsily. He saw, stretching his right hand across the desk, palm upward, as if he would have liked another hand slipped into it, and he was faintly smiling, “I wish I had seen you so,” he said. But a fit of shuddering convulsed him. “Go on! Go on!”

  “Lest we should be overheard by any lackey I led him to a seat in the adjoining room, where chaperones dozed in their corsets like jellies left overnight in their moulds, and there I questioned him. I did not thrust his poor dissolving wits with your name, but I begged him to tell me what pother threatened this tall young friend of mine. It was difficult to keep his attention on the matter, for he kept on lookin
g round at the chaperones and blaming them very censoriously for being old, a state into which (he seemed to think) it was disgraceful for any but himself to fall. But this I got from him: and when he spoke of it he was more nearly recalled to life than I have seen him in a year. Though he himself is not quite a living man, his faltered words and shaken gestures reflected, like an old and clouded mirror, the speech and carriage of a living man. He affected turns of phrase and tricks of bearing, which I have never known him use before, and which I concluded were borrowed from his recent companions. Again and again he swore ‘by thunder,’ and as he said it raised his right hand with the wrist held far forward—”

  Condorex rose to his feet and swayed backwards on his heels, his fingers busy with his neckcloth, “It is the Duke of Allsouls to the life!” he groaned. “Derrydown’s brother-in-law, Saltoun’s associate! Gad, the conspiracy that is between all those who were born with family and fortune!” The chair caught him, and he sank in a hunchback heap, glowering at Harriet. “Oh, if she would only speak too loud,” he thought, “so that I might tell her not to shout!” With satisfaction he watched her mouth forming a little O until it occurred to one that she had read his mind and was giving him what he wanted. “Oh, is your accursed kindness inexhaustible!” he shouted. “Go on! go on! Tell me what your old crony has discovered.” “Why,” she continued patiently, “that your party feels its honour something compromised by the presence in its Cabinet of Lord Rampound, the peculiar odour of whose reputation has spread to all parts of the country, and they would welcome an occasion to demonstrate their integrity. The older members of the Party do not love you, no, nor Scorchington, nor Grindlay, since the rebellion you engaged in that shipwrecked the fortunes of Lord Derrydown. Grindlay is so sensible of this that he has turned King’s Evidence, and has slipped away to them by night with news of a scheme in which, he says, you and Lord Scorchington have designed to demand a loan from Prince Camaralzaman of Mangostan under the pretence of an investment, the understood consideration being your friendship in the Cabinet.”