Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

by Rebecca West

  At that she set down her glass and turned towards him, and put her arms about him and rubbed her face against his neck, making soft sounds such as a cat makes to its kitten.

  “Oh, do not distress yourself,” he told her nonchalantly. “It were better, even as you calculated, that I feel this emotion than the thousand times sharper pang of disgrace. Or is it so? Have you done anything for my good by saving me? It may perhaps seem ungracious of me to mention these doubts, but I am now perfectly convinced that you are aware of them whether I tell them or not, so I might as well afford myself the relief of self-expression.” Turning his empty glass between his finger and thumb, he meditated for a while; then asked. “How do you account for this gift of yours?”

  She answered timidly, “You yourself once explained that there was a mystical confusion of substance in us.”

  “Oh, my lords and gentlemen,” he bayed in travesty of his own deep-mouthed platform manner, “what are we to think of a universe in which there is a mystical confusion of substance in opposites!” He laughed idly. “What an unseemly chaos!” He swung the wineglass round a few times more, and asked, “You would agree, would you not, my dear, that we are opposites?”

  “Ay, we are opposites,” said Harriet, putting her hands under her cloak as if she feared they might be slapped. “But surely that is no great harm. There is the North, and there is the Southland there is no war between them.”

  “They have their position, however,” he instructed her, “in extended space where there is room for everything. In the world of the spirit it is not the same. Look, I have spilt a drop of wine upon your gown!”

  “It is of no consequence,” she said, “this was the gown’s last wearing.”

  “I do not believe you,” he said, keeping his eye upon the spot, “you are too inveterately agreeable. I am sure it causes you trouble. Yet I cannot be sorry I have spilt it, it looks so pretty. How like a drop of blood it is, there below your breast! As I was saying, my love, there is no room in the world of spirits for opposites. It is as vast as the universe, but it is small as a pin-point. Believe me, it has room for only one will. There is not a particle of accommodation for opposites. I have been defeated, I perceive, not by Saltoun, nor by Allsouls, nor by Grindlay, nor even as the moralists would pretend, by myself, but by the odd and unstable Immortal who made us, and at the moments of our ingeminations forgot this important principle in the technique of creation. Well, well, the milk is spilt.” He glowered before him, and presently her fingers worked their way into his palm. “Why, how kind you are,” he said, “how amenable, how you cling! Will you not concede a little to your opposite and compromise with my principle of negotiation?”

  Her eyes met his very tenderly, but she shook her head.

  “No?” he pressed her. “Well, you are right. To concede to one’s opposite, in the most infinitesimal degree, is to die.”

  She said in a low voice, “I have always felt it my one duty not to die.”

  A silence fell and endured until a coal fell from the fire, and he exclaimed, “How long have we been sitting here? How long is it since those last words you spoke? I have a sense that my spirit has travelled a long distance in the time. I have the dry feeling at the back of my eyes that one gets when one has stayed up all night. I have been far away, I have resolved something massive, if I could but remember what it was. Why, my love, how blanched you have grown! And you are trembling! You are riding softly down the moments as a snowflake rides down the airs, white, oh, so white, and weightless as anything in this ponderous universe, and you are trembling, trembling, trembling! You are afraid. My love, what do you fear?”

  She whispered, “Do you not know?”

  “What you fear? I have no notion.” He recoiled from her steady gaze, and cried very piteously, “What, have I thought something I have already lied out of my knowledge? Need I unmask more children of my mind?”

  She shook her head, and he sank back relieved. “I fear it is no use,” she said wearily. “I see I have done you no real service by coming here to-night.”

  Putting his hands behind his head and lolling back on the cushions, he laughed. “Well, that is my trouble, and not yours! Go home, sweet little fool, and sleep, and rise refreshed, and make real troubles for yourself, by swaying your full skirts round your garden in the morning, so that the young man who takes his bath late in the house opposite is reminded of a rose; and by reminding another, in the afternoon when you spread these skirts behind your tea-equipage, of a dove that preens and coos; and by making yet a third man wait a long time in your drawing-room, while your sewing-maid pops her head round the door and says (the lying mopsy) you will not be above a minute more, and then swimming in with your white arms bare and a display of the lovely line which runs from your chin to your bosom, you will make him think as tenderly of swans on a lake as ever Leda did. Oh, you will have troubles of your own!”

  Harriet had her lace rag at her eyes again. “Oh, I know well I have not yet come to the painful age of serenity, she sobbed, “but if I have been of no service to you, then the world is not good music.”

  “I have not the slightest notion what you mean,” he said, “since the only usefulness I have ever seen in music is that it affords employment. But whatever you meant I am in a position to assure you that you are raising irrelevant matters. The world is but material created to afford the separate race of creditors scope to gratify their curious appetites; and from their point of view it is an excellent world. Upon my soul, I do not see how it could be better.” He rose to help her with the adjustment of her cloak, and after gave her a friendly hug. “You are a good girl for coming, and I am very grateful to you, and I wish this were an hour when I could send you home in one of my automobiles. For I would take some pride in showing you that, though I shall not have enough to buy myself a crust of bread when all is over, I have three as handsome automobiles as anyone could wish to see. Well, well, another time. How shall my butler telephone for a taxi. No? Ah, I presume the broomstick waits without. I would not keep you from it, indeed it excites some envy in me. What should I not give to step out of this house and rise up into the air, and rise, and rise, and rise, until I would not be able to tell my roof from any other. Yet I believe I would know it from any height, for the smoke it would wear as a feather in its. cap would be coloured the peculiar tint of burned bills, which might dye the product of other chimneys here and there, but never to the same degree. Well, there is no use dreaming. I must stay at home and face my ruin. Give me a farewell kiss, sweet enemy, who has at last proved to me that it is absolute.”

  “Then will you not forgive me?” she whimpered, and raised doe’s eyes while proffering her mouth.

  But when their lips met he twitched sharply, hissing in his breath, as if an excruciating ecstasy had laid hold on him like a twinge of gout. “But this is an extraordinary pleasure!” he drawled gloating. “You know, my dear, that I have felt for you always the extreme of love, as well as the extreme of lasciviousness. But there was a third emotion always present, which I cannot name even in this moment when it possesses me. Ah, you nod your head? Then you always knew it? Will you not name it? No? How you tease tonight! You knew where my soul was wandering, in that period which lasted either a second or an hour, yet you would not tell; and I think it had some relevance to the point we now debate.” He folded his arms round her, and rocked her fragility to and fro, tenderly smiling down on her, who looked submissive yet big-eyed and vigilant, like a little cat who fears that the petting she receives may yet turn to tail-pulling and rough usage.

  “Ah, it wells up in me, stronger and stronger, this unknown emotion I feel for you!” he breathed voluptuously. “It is perhaps nameless because unprecedented, and unprecedented because evoked by your beauty, which has no parallel, and now upsets the standards it has established for itself by entering upon a new phase. For you are different in my eyes tonight. How sculptural you appear in this metamorphosis, with your marble pallor, and the close flutings
of your gown disposed about your classically perfect form! You remind me of a painted lunette in one of my own upper rooms, in which the artist depicts a young man lion-ruddy with the hues of health, stretching out his arms in eternal desire towards a young woman that stands in the recesses of a cave, all black and white, and bloodless and perfect, like yourself. ’Tis Orpheus mourning for his Eurydice, gone from him to death. Oh, without question, you are beautiful!”

  He hugged her like a bear, he rocked her to and fro till she could hardly keep her feet.

  “Now you look like a woman who dies the little death of pleasure, with your lips parted and your eyes fixed in a stare! I fed the strongest disposition to interfere with your fate. I do not want you to recall a rose to that lad, a dove to that man in his thirties, a swan to that grave signor with the pointed silver beard and order in his button-hole. Why, what a universe this is! One cannot mention any of its details without being shocked by its confusion! For do not a rose and a dove resemble each other more closely than a dove and a swan, though those last two are birds? I would transport you to a purer world where things sit more stably in their categories. I would clang an iron gate on you, and shut you in a garden, where there are no coloured flowers, but only tall lilies standing in wet black earth, and no trees save the decent cypress. Ah, my love!” he said, clasping her very amorously, “What pleasure it would give me to shut you away from all the heat of living!”

  She wrenched herself away from him, and scuttered to the door, where she stood and looked back at him with immense eyes. “Am I rough?” he enquired, but very absently, for his mob of creditors was pressing in on him again. “You must pardon me, my dear. A man has an inveterate disposition to deal freely with what has once been given him freely.” He waved away the phantoms. “You must discuss this with my secretary,” he drawled, “ay, even you, though you are my wife.” Then he stalked leisurely to Harriet’s side and took the door-knob from her hand, saying, “What, you must go? Well, so you shall.” He tucked his arm in hers and walked her out through his hall, strutting as if they marched to a band, and were under an obligation to amuse. “Now, who could have expected,” he remarked airily, “that the mood induced by utter hopelessness should be so exceedingly like the effect of laughing gas? Not, God knows, that I want to laugh. But there is the same sense of an expanding emptiness inside the skull, the same sense of being a balloon and trying to find a resting-place on the slipperiness of another balloon, all being within another balloon that has escaped the fingers of its holder. Write down this curious coincidence in that little book you keep for things it is useful to know. You have given over far too many pages in it to the addresses of manicurists, considering you have but two hands.”

  He had to take his arm away from her to fling open the door, and when it was wide he stood in forgetfulness of her, legs far apart, surveying the empty cradle of the traffic. “Oh, I am thoroughly persuaded of the truth of magic,” he said. “What is waiting here? Not these dark houses. Not these lamps nor the white porcupines of light they radiate. Not the causeway, nor the pavements, that are the gay colour of the put-upon. Not the stars. These are inanimate. There is nothing else. Yet there is something waiting. Why, what is this? Your hand, of course. You are offering to say good-bye to me. Well, if you must, you must. But you need not be so hasty about it. Time was when I should have felt shame at being seen to let a wench out of my house at this hour, but now I do not care. Nay, it is of service to me, for those who see it will know that the hearse which (my mind’s eye shows me) is halted round the corner cannot be for me. But do not think I have lost all objection to irregular behaviour. I shall be annoyed beyond bearing if you turn into a black cat the minute I close the door. You must wait to do that till you get to the area-railings of the next house at least. I cannot have this mansion given a bad name, particularly as, in consequence of what you have told me, I shall now have to sell it.”

  She slipped away from him, looking back at him over her shoulder as she descended the steps. Very genially he cried after her, “Well, you must come back some afternoon! You and I, and my wife Ginevra, and the bailiff’s men, shall take a dish of tea together and laugh very heartily over the evening when you called on me and broke the news that I was a cheat and a bankrupt.”

  She had passed beyond the trench of sooty shadow cast by the house on the silver pavement, and was in full moonlight when she turned; so that the tail of her gown, dropping beneath her cloak, shone like an angel’s robe, and the hands with which she covered her trembling mouth seemed luminous, and the tears in her eyes might have been taken by experts for diamonds.

  “Oh, you need not look penitent,” he called to her merrily, “for I have enjoyed every minute of your stay. You are lovelier than ever, and you have kept your fine shape. Even your shadow, squat though it falls because the moon is at its zenith, has the lines of a Greek vase. Pervasively attractive Harriet! My sole complaint is that you have talked too little. You have not made as many as I expected of those remarks I love to pick up and wear in my button-hole for a day or two and sniff now and then to keep up my spirits. Why have you failed me thus, Harriet?”

  She murmured in broken accents, “You mock me, I am never witty. But I own I have been stilted in my speech with you, and I beg pardon for it. But what you have said to me to-night has for the most part been so peculiar to your world, which is not mine, that I have had the greatest difficulty in finding any answers.”

  With sudden panic he cried out, “Yes, that is what it was! And why was it so?” He pointed a stiff finger at her, “It is because you are my opposite!” He made motions with his hands as if to beat her away from his home, stepped backwards over the threshold, and slammed the door. He hung on to the handle, breathing hard, and not letting his features loosen from the harsh grimace of hate, till a look of cunning came on him, and he claimed jauntily, “Well, I have excluded her!” He turned about and strolled back through the hall, swaggering like an actor in a costume play, and humming aloud, save when he stopped and shook his fist at the ceiling, whispering, “My opposite! My opposite!” When he had returned to his library he poured out a glass of wine, and overfilled it saying to himself, “No wonder she can read my thoughts! There is no need to suppose magic there. She need but look in her own mind, record what she sees, imagine its opposite, and she has all of me.”

  He had not drunk above two or three more glasses of wine before a dizziness came on him, and he had to feel his way across the room and stretch himself on the sofa. “What, am I ill? No, I am drunk! Now that I come to think of it I have been swilling ever since the morning. And it was the same yesterday, and the day before that. For long I have been unable to perform the duties attaching to my eminence without putting that into my mouth which whips my nerves to deal with them and at the same time dulls my sense of how much I am in debt. My body, believing that my mind would some day crown it with the bays of empire, protected it in the taking of its medicine by refusing to suffer the effects of alcohol, and by neither retching nor staggering. No one has ever seen me drunk. But now my body is no longer buoyed up by the hope of power no doubt it will betray me to the people’s scorn; and I shall be known from to-day as a drunkard as well as a bankrupt. That, however, belongs to to-morrow.” He lay quiet for a little, then put out his hand among the cushions. “I am lying among the imprints of her form,” he thought. He rolled one cushion on to the floor but found it too much effort to do more. “That, however, belongs to to-morrow,” he repeated. “Tonight I had better fix my attention on how I am to get to my bed. But do I want to go to bed? It is a terribly defenceless attitude, lying in bed; and even I discomfit the darkness by leaving on my light, I shall not like it when it is the morning, and they come in and find me sleeping and see me before I see them. For I shall sleep, I am so drunk that I shall certainly sleep. What must I do?”

  He stared up at the ceiling and asked himself the question many times, until he became aware that his butler was leaning over him. His white face see
med curiously dewed with excitement.

  “Will you not come out into the hall, my lord?” he asked

  “Why should I do that?” asked Condorex. “I think you are attempting to make me rise before I am able, that you may mock at me.”

  “Oh, no, my lord,” said the butler. “I had observed nothing about your lordship’s condition. But I have heard your lordship say at dinner that you do not truly know how many men and maids you keep in this house, and you could inform yourself of that at a glance if you would but rise and go out into the hall, for they are all out there.”

  “But what are they doing up and about at such an hour?” asked Condorex.

  “Why, since an hour ago they have none of them been able to sleep in their beds for a feeling that something prodigious was about to happen in the house. For you must know,” said the butler with a very sly leer, “that nothing can come to pass in a household without the servants getting wind of it instanter. And now they are all gathered in the hall in their nightgowns and nightcaps, holding their candlesticks to their bosoms with such shaking hands that several of the maids have had their curl-papers singed.”

  “Well, I do want to see them,” yawned Condorex. “I doubt that they will be looking their best, and if they were I should not want to cast my eyes on them, since that would only the more vivdly remind me that there is not one of them whose wages are less than six weeks in arrears.”

  “If you would but go out into the hall,” said the butler, “you would not think of that, nor would they. For the prodigy they expected is happening.”