Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy

Harriet Hume

Rebecca West

Harriet Hume

Rebecca West

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

I

T
HEIR
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.