Harriet Hume

A London Fantasy

Rebecca West

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453207420
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

In this modern fairy tale, Rebecca West transports her reader with a tale of the polar opposites of mind and spirit, love and power
Harriet Hume's unchanging beauty and commitment to her art stand in stark contrast to Arnold Condorex's more worldly goals. After a romantic tryst, she discovers that she can read his mind, but Arnold, with his sights set on moving up in the world, quickly parts from the mysterious lady. As they encounter each other over the years, Harriet's intuitive powers continue to unsettle Arnold, opening his eyes to the darker elements of his political and financial aspirations, even as he remains drawn to her.Beautifully drawn and filled with magical touches, West's fantasy explores innate and learned gender roles, as her characters uncover the mystery surrounding their otherworldly connection.

V

HE spoke to his image in the mirror above the mantelpiece, as he was apt to do nowadays when he was alone; for otherwise a feeling came upon him that there was nobody in the room, not even himself.

“It is a strange thing,” he began, and broke off to wonder, “Is this mirror my own or have I sold it? I know there have been great transactions of late to which I am a party, but at the moment I cannot remember whether they are concluded. At any rate my reflection is my own. Ha! That is an asset they cannot rive from me.” He picked up the broken thread again. “It is a strange thing, the pleasure one can draw, in the most disadvantageous circumstances, from knowing what is a secret to the vulgar. I will own that on going down to the Cabinet meeting this early afternoon, and passing the posters which cried out again and again, ‘Fall of Mondh,’ I felt a certain gratification because I was aware that they announced the piece of news quite other than that the consternated city imagined. When I tipped my hat to the crowd which had gathered round Downing Street to give me that dreadful croaking which betokens loyalty to the unfortunate (I am a sinking ship) I had much ado not to point my stick at the newsboy who hawked his wares on its fringe, and explain, “Ladies and gentlemen, you have misread that notice. You think it means that the pearl of Asian hill-towns, Mondh, has been invested by the enemy. Believe me, you are wrong. That town enjoys, and ever shall enjoy, the supreme impregnability of a cloud. As soon shall the twilight he stormed, as soon shall the governor of sunset give up his keys. The placard concerns only myself, who am the first Baron Mondh, and who am fallen. ‘Good day, ladies. Good day, gentlemen. If you do not pray the Lord to have mercy on my soul, I shall pray Him to let you rise in the world, for I am not so genial as has been claimed in the public prints of my own party.’ And I preened myself again, on passing back to my house in the late afternoon, at knowing the catch behind the placards which announced ‘Relief of Mondh.’ I lolled back on my cushions of my Chimborazi-Mecklenburgh, which is, so far as I can see, the last automobile I shall ever own, and which I own, indeed, in a highly technical sense of the word, since I have never paid for it, and laughed to realise that those placards referred to another subject than their fellows shown earlier in the day. The Mondh that had been relieved was not myself but the city, which had never been in peril. I am most certainly still fallen. Without a doubt I shall soon go from the Cabinet. It is a most disagreeable law of human affairs that only those things can be saved which have never been lost. Only those who have been born to family and fortune can ever raise themselves above the danger of obscurity and pain.”

He gloomed into the mirror, and his thought, swinging clear of its groove, noted: “I am very sallow. It is as if the blood did not reach my skin by half an inch, which is possible enough, since the ambition that was the engine of my heart is broken down. I perceive I am no longer very handsome, and I have a look of failure. I do not believe I could vanquish a woman casually encountered, now. Ah, what a delicious satisfaction must be reigning in the breast of Prince Camaralzaman, who is fighting an enemy whose womenkind he so freely dishonoured before ever the campaign began! How silent are the Duchesses who, till the news came three months ago that the Mangoes had risen, were delighted to have it supposed that all had happened that could happen on the yacht at Deauville, in the cottage at Marlow, under the night-blue flag printed with the vermilion lotus-flower!” He tittered scornfully at them and all women, and felt more of a man. His mind ran in its groove again. “’Tis a jest that I should have been proud to make myself, this announcement of Mondh’s fall! What artistry to go through Eton, Oxford, and the Embassy, and let none of his playmates or instructors know that he doubted the India Office explanation that Mondh is the name which, by a curious obstinacy, the British give to some unspecified fortress in Mangostan! For truly, so had I watered the fame of Mondh with my oratory, its reported fall spread as profound a consternation over the spirit of England as the loss of the Royal George or the death of Nelson. It was an excellent jest! I remember that when I met the young prince I seemed to see a dark eye smiling through a curiously shaped cut in a palm-leaf. Well, well, what should we have said, I wonder, had I known that he was to play this prank at my expense, and had he known that I alone of all men was to play a rather better one at his! For I have bested him! Oh, no question about that!”

He and his image laughed together like the old friends they were. “Gad, they had none of them a word to say, sitting round like whitings at a loss because they have come into one of their sacred places where it is not manners to swallow their tails. ‘We cannot contradict the news,’ said Grindlay, ‘because such contradictions are not believed. If the Mangoes go on feeding the Soviet wireless service with details of the Fall of Mondh, to which the Russians give their honest homespun touch and spread and spread and spread with their passion for spawning the unpleasant, we shall not be believed if we say in our flat Island way, “Mondh has not fallen.’” And sour Saltoun grumbled, his eyes downcast on his blotting-pad, ‘This is a most loathsome business.’ ‘Ay,’ said I, ‘but not unmendable,’ ‘What?’ said they. ‘Not unmendable?’ Not one of them had it, not one.” He bent towards his image and wished it had a solid forearm on which he might rest his hand while he laughed out his story. “‘Why,’ said I, ‘I cannot imagine a matter more easily mendable. For cannot Mondh be retaken as well as taken?’ They stirred their bottoms doubtfully on their seats. ‘’Tis a flat announcement to make,’ our Grindlay moped. ‘“Mondh was taken, Mondh is retaken.” Against the subtleties of the Mangoes, and the filthy directness of the Bolshevists, we shall perform no great feat of conviction.’ ‘Can we not give such details of the city’s rescue as shall swell the hearts of England at least, and with reasonable luck excite the rest of Europe favourably?’ said I. ‘We are not an inartistic people. The contrary is proved by Shakespeare, Milton and my Lord Byron.’ ‘Details?’ snarled Grindlay. How I love to torment that little drysalting kind of man with my nonchalance! ‘How can we give details,’ snarls he, ‘without giving the names of generals and regiments that performed this great feat of arms, and you know there is none. And if we say those are there who are not, how shall we procure their silence, or keep their confidence in our government if we approached them to that end?’

“It was strange that it was I who kept my head through it all, though it was my reputation that was in most desperate case. ‘Not so fast,’ said I. ‘I think you have overlooked a regiment we may draw on here. We all know that Mondh, although lacking in certain attributes common to other cities, is for all that a very good city. I do not know of one anywhere that has better served the purpose of its founders. Does it not occur to you that a city of that sort may well have inhabitants that would develop the same quality of usefulness? Ay, Mondh was defended by a regiment raised from its own citizens, which was temporarily overpowered two days ago by some monstrous treachery of the rebels relating, I think, to its womenfolk. But between two and three this morning they came to their own again, and there is a very useful little man I have in my office who could write as stirring an account as anyone could wish of the dauntless courage which gave them back their city. He is a very useful little man, this Maurice Tarnishwing, who came down from Oxford with great gifts which he has diluted with the juice of the grape till the mixture is out of keeping save in a place set apart for the consumption of liquor. But he is a very useful little man, for his pen strikes flame from the paper, and he does what he is bid and keeps silent, ever since there was some trouble with the accounts in the Ministry of Munitions; and he is a great patriot. Why, if you will let me go to good Tarnishwing and say the word, you will have by noon to-morrow the whole of Europe without a doubt in his head but that Mondh is retaken.’ Why, they had not a word to say, stirred their bottoms about again for a second or two, out of reluctance to give me credit, and then grunted assent. Even Saltoun did but draw a seventieth triangle on his blotting-pad and croaked again like an old grey parrot, ‘This is a loathsome business.’ Oh, I drew them and my party out of adversity as deftly as a seamstress threads a needle.”

He lurched towards his image so heavily that his outstretched fingers stubbed themselves against the glass. “Ah, if it had been a real man, and they could have got drunk together and staggered weeping down some street of wavering lights, clutching each other’s necks and weeping, but feeling very warm within! “They hate me so!” he mourned. “I have saved them, but they hate me so! When all was sealed and settled, and I had seen to it that good Tarnishwing had been set down at his patriotic task in a sitting-room at the Cavendish with Rosie Lewis to bring him the champagne and orange juice that are as mother’s milk to him, and we could all go home, there came a moment when good-byes should have been said, but were not, they were all so poured out in the work of hating me. They do not send their hatred wringing towards me as candid hostility, for I have arrows of my own that are more sharply pointed, and I shoot them straight. They send them downwards grey and hissing like rain, to make the earth sodden so that I cannot stand on it; and there is none can stop the rain. Why do they hate me thus? I have rescued them to-day, and I do not believe there was ever a yesterday when I harmed them. It is in part, I know, because I spoke honestly though craftily, and brought to light that we all knew there is no Mondh: but I do not think that is a large part of it. ’Tis independent of my separate actions. I am sure that if they were wakened suddenly from sleep and could not remember anything that had happened in the last twelve months, they would hate me. Oh, why is it? For I have qualities, I have a good heart, I am kind, I cannot help feeling that in some recondite sense I have always been a good man. It is because of the savage that survives in all men, and is magically minded, and believes all conditions to be infectious, that they shun me. They are aware that I am wasting away with a disease of the future, and they fear but that the germ may be carried on the breath. Oh, the case against me is strong! I am financially sick, I was never one of their sort, I was poor and had to struggle, and maybe there is contagion in that lowness too. And in any case all men rejoice in the ruin of others, and most of all if it be one like me, in whom the desire to rise was a social impertinence; and I have baulked them once of the consummation of their rejoicing, for they were certain they had me trapped with Scorchington. Which they had not.”

His eyes met his image’s, and looked away. They both grew pale. “Which they had not….”

“Lord knows, Lord knows, I have confused the ground to my own disadvantage, and given those that hated me from sheer malice a chance to pretend they hate me from love of the virtue I have discarded, and much evidence by which they can win the public to their side. I am afraid I must admit that I am a rogue in a much less recondite sense than I am a good man. Why, I have all the hallmarks of a rogue, even to the follies, though I am so shrewd. This afternoon, did not my heart leap up in amazement and fury when I stood in the lobby and saw them all penguin-flapping their arms back to the arm-holes the lackeys proffered, and fussing the scarves round their squat necks, and taking care during all processes to keep their heads turned so that I was north-north-west to their straight gaze. ’Twas an almost insectine uniformity of movement; such as one has observed when walking in the country with a naturalist friend who stops and cries with a rapture hard for a man of more liberal interests to understand. What! Do you pass by the smaller yittlewiffer at its wondrous work! Ay, those small specks proceeding towards that rottenness in the plank! See how the pretty dears carry on their backs a grain of dung to some safe place where they may eat it and thus by excrement procure a plastic material for their hive! Do you not regret your lack of learning in natural history, which would enhance your enjoyment of the country by revealing to you customs as dainty as those? But these still smaller yittlewiffers that stood with me in the lobby of Downing Street, surely the smallest yittlewiffers that ever God with His talent for minute creation could make, had for their communal task the building not of a hive for the living but of a tomb for a corpse; and that corpse was my fame. And not one stood aloof from it, not even Scorchington. Why, he was worse than all the rest, for when I sought him out with my eyes he was full north-west of me. Scorchington, who has so often laid his head close against mine to our mutual advantage! But my fury died as soon as it was born, for I remembered that I had myself often noted that it is the special weakness of rogues (and the most common cause of their ruin) to expect from one another a degree of loyalty that it would be rare to find among honest men.

“Well, since a rogue never realises his roguehood till it has grown common knowledge to all the world, I suppose my quality has been notorious for years. And the deuce of it is, I am come the wrong time to win success with my peculiar quality, for in each generation there is but one rogue and no more who is allowed to be great. One of the kind the common man is willing to pamper and adore for sometimes he himself tires of respectability, and then it is a comfort to him to see a rogue sitting in comfortable grossness with his ration of eight bottles of champagne and two wenches a day, all earned by cheating, and coming to no harm, nay, on the contrary, rising to power, wearing red robes at the Opening of Parliament, talking to kings with but the faintest inclination of the head. For if a rogue can triumph so, the universe is not such a closed prison as they say, and one might find a road yet out of Surbiton. But, mark you, there must be only one of us, for if there are more, why, this ceases to be a heartening dream but another certificate that life is intolerable; since that it would be, if there were an army of scoundrels that had to be fed on earth’s first fruits before the virtuous might eat. Oh, there is reason in it. And the rogue’s single seat is occupied. Rampound took it ten years before I came. There is no place for me, I shall be turned away.”

An image is but an appearance on glass that has been mercuried. It cannot be a friend. It cannot say “But, look you, none of this matters. Have you considered …” Oh, if it would but say, “But you are far too tired to think of this to-night. Listen when I tell you some pleasant news that resolves the imbroglio!” But it does not, it keeps mum. So there is no reason why one should not lay one’s head on the mantelpiece and sob it out. But soon he jerked himself erect and cried to himself, “And do you see nothing in all this, you fool? Do you conceive that all this happened by accident? Why, wake up, man! How came it that you came after Rampound instead of before, or at the same time, which would have suited you, for on equal terms you could have bested him? How came it that you were born with genius of a sort that demands wealth as its setting as imperatively as diamonds demand an aristocracy to wear them, and there was not one thing in your native estate that did not stink of poverty and try to hold you to it?” He paused, agape, scanning the background shadows of the mirror. He could not be sure but that the door had opened, and there had hung in the crack the blank sugar-almond of his wife’s face, to which age had done nothing but turn it from pink to white, as if Time had held it too long in his cheek. But no interruption came, there was but the drip-drip-drip of his own misery. “No, it was nothing,” he murmured. “But it might well have been nothing, and yet been my wife.” He broke out into more of his screaming-fit. “Have you no eyes? Do you think all those were pure mischances? Why should you not have had the luck of other men and have a beautiful wife who was no idiot, or have been unhappily married on terms so free from obligation that infidelity was not a mean welshing? And other men’s creditors are devils only within reason. They do not prod and prod one’s vitals with hot pitchforks, and give a man no time to rest and get the brain-pan cool, and think how he might pay. This cannot all be accident.

“Do you not see, you fool,” he told his image, pointing his forefinger professionally, “the influence of your opposite? If one is sealed within a globe, and is a candle, and must burn, how shall one survive if the globe is flooded with water? I will not be a limp fish, I am a candle. Yet nothing is more sure than that so long as one’s opposite survives one will be liable to be plunged into conditions utterly contrary to one’s being, which are an attack on one’s essence; ay, which condemn one to death. I have told you already, in this matter the spiritual world is not as the physical world. The gross air of the physical world offers resistance to waves of hate, it will not carry them very far. The lion can live in safety with the lamb cropping the lawns not half a mile away, until the mawkish smell of her herbivorousness seeks him down the wind and draws him to her by its insult to his difference; and her terrible meek breath on his fierce muzzle posits a relationship and makes him her murderer. But if the wind sit in the right quarter and he be not hungry they need not meet, he can remain innocent. But in the spiritual world, alas! it is not so! The medium is too volatile, it can be stained in a second all one colour: if one part is stained, it must all be stained. Why, its headstrong alchemies, the confusion of substances it not only permits but procures with delight, are most dangerous. They prevent a man from standing upright, they cut out his most vital parts, they yield him utterly to his opposite, who by necessity must wish his death. That is why the lot of man is so fruitful. ’Tis the reason why he must bind on himself the torment which is consciousness, the heavy burden which is the will, and thus deprive himself of rest. One cannot tell from minute to minute what one’s opposite may do! Great God, what is my opposite doing to me now? My face is shining more brightly from the mirror, and I had hoped it was a good omen, but I perceive the effect is but an illusion due to contrast, for the walls behind me are dripping with darkness. See, the shadows have advanced till they are looking over my shoulder. Ah, give me strength to turn and face this new appalment!”

With his hands out before him, shielding his face and breast, he spun round on his tottering legs; but let fall his hands and sighed. “There is no fighting an impalpable foe. I surrender. And how it is gaining on me! Not half an hour ago I could see each plaster wheat-ear on the treillage of my ceiling; but now there is a new ceiling to my room, and it is made of blackness. How is the malign power of my opposite demonstrated, that can take light away from me, which is as freely given man as air! Or is this not a transformation of the external world, but has my sight been blasted? Oh, I will not be blind, I will not be blind!” He flung himself towards the windows and cast himself on his knees beside it, gripping the sash, and staring out and up, his mouth wide open. “No, ’tis a general wreckage, not a private malady! Look, how the dark lies like a great cat in the yard behind my house, and how darkness sits on the clouds that were as good and grey when I came in! Something is swallowing up the wo...