Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (14 page)

As he smiled across at Harriet, and she smiled back, blushing a little, there came into his mind, and brought with it a sullenness as of November, what he had heard Ginevra say of her. The occasion had been not long after they were married, at a supper under Lady Ophidian’s prepotent chandeliers. Someone was speaking of the young pianist who was also a great beauty, and he had sat dumb with his eyes on his plate, since he was still enraged with Harriet on account of that quarrel which he could not now recollect. Suddenly he had heard Ginevra say: “But did you not tell us she was a pianist? Then what you are saying about her cannot be true.” “Why not?” had enquired Harriet’s advocate, fixing his monocle. “Why, if her hands were as small as you are pretending, she would not be able to play the piano. So what you are saying about her cannot be true.” Having uttered this defence of accuracy, Ginevra retrieved two or three peas that had fallen from her fork while it was suspended in mid-air and swallowed them as if they were the argument.

“Now, why,” he mused, leaning his elbows on the desk, and cupping his chin in his hands, that he might the more comfortably look at Harriet on her couch, “is she tittering to herself?” The part of his mind that was still gloomily occupying itself with Ginevra, as one bites on an aching tooth, reflected that he had so distinctly retained her comment on Harriet because it was certainly the most intelligent remark she had ever made. “But now the jade is looking sorry for me, and now she is looking very angry, and has twirled herself round on the pivot of her little hindquarters, and is sitting up; and she is biting her lip, and wagging her head from side to side as if she would say something, and fears a nicer woman would not say it, but hopes that she will say it, ay, and in terms that will be remembered. Now she is looking down on her hands very intently. What a strange life of the mind she leads, playing catscradle with her own phantasies, like a kitten that has found a skein of wool! Now she is rising. What an admirable energy keeps all her movements firm!” His mind maliciously presented him with a picture of Ginevra as she would be lying at this moment on the sands of the Lido, golden and shapely and limp as an anchovy. There was no occasion in life when she was not limp; no, not one. “Now she is advancing on me, and with an air of purpose, too. Is she going to upbraid me? Well, it will be very curious, like watching a sweetmeat fly into a passion,”

But Harriet was meek as a schoolgirl come to ask its teacher a question. Standing in front of his desk with her hands behind her back, she repeated him in a little voice, “You have not asked me about my music.”

“Have I not, my dear?” he answered. “Well, it was not indifference that prevented me from doing so, but confidence that you had fulfilled your early promise. I am sure that the faithful Bechstein still whinnies when it hears your step, and that you are a great woman, and I am right, am I not?”

“I might be great, I might indeed be great,” she assured him eagerly. “Critics have said I might be remembered with the greatest, with Busoni, with Schnabel, were it not”—and she brought forward her hands and laid them on the desk that he might have the best view of them—“were it not for these!”

“For these, my dear? But they are perfect in every way.”

“They are too small!” she furiously mewed, and drummed them on the desk. “I cannot stretch an octave! If you knew the exercises I have to drudge over to circumvent this defect!”

“Yet I am sure, my dear,” he told her, patting them kindly, “that they have caused you as much pleasure as a woman as they have caused you pain as an artist, for all of us love a pretty hand on a woman. I know I could as soon look at one as at a flower.”

“Yes, but to be deprived of the credit for—!” she began tearfully, but checked herself.

He did not enquire why she should clap her fingers over her mouth, for he was thinking how odd it was that she should speak of her hands at this very moment. Idly he said, to prolong the pleasure of seeing her impassioned by talk of what seemed to her important: “And do you still give your famous recitals?”

“Not so often now,” she answered, and lost her petulance in gravity. “The great Karinthy and the great Martel have honoured me by letting me play with them in trio, and ’tis with them I make most of my appearances.”

He thought, “This is surely much less glorious than to have concerts dedicated to her sole performance, or to have whole orchestras dedicated to her accompaniment, as she used to do. Well, well! She has, I suppose, discovered herself not exempt from the iron laws which decree that a woman’s frail form shall exhaust itself long before she attains the peak of supremacy in any art. Poor lass, I hope the discovery was not made too grimly!” He scanned her face for marks of failure which (since he feared it most of all earthly calamities) he conceived must be obvious and nearly as terrible as the scars of leprosy. But the creature held herself as confidently as an heiress; and while he scanned her the corners of her little mouth pricked up in a sly smile, and he was sure that had her eyes not been downcast they would have been jigging with merriment. “She seems very well with herself,” he reflected, not without peevishness, “she is very near to smirking. Can it be that one of these foreign fellows is her lover? For it cannot be denied that the little wench lacks principle. I have no doubt that did I ruffle her on yonder couch I would be infringing the rights of another; and let us be just, there is nothing to comminate in that, for it would be against nature if such loveliness were not enjoyed. Still, I could have wished it had not been a foreigner. But what is she after now?”

For she had lifted the full skirt of her muslin gown, and was fumbling in her petticoat pocket, from which she presently brought forth a folded sheet of paper. With an air of being slightly offended, not so much by an affront to herself as by some failure to distinguish what was matter for jest and what was not, she pushed this across for him to examine; while she sank on her knees, laying her cheek on his desk, and playing with the fine toys he had gathered to pierce with holes his too solid hours of labour, such as his lapis lazuli seal, his Dutch brass tobacco-box scratched with a picture of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, and his French inkstand set in malachite.

“What is this?” Arnold Condorex asked himself. “Why, ’tis a programme of a concert she and her cronies have given, and it is ornamented with a photograph that shows them all. Well, I must take back all I said, for these are very old men, and though Harriet is a good girl she cannot work miracles.” Aloud he said: “Your friends look very grave! You might think they had carried the cares of State on their shoulders all their days, instead of merely diverting themselves with musical instruments.”

“You are teasing me,” she answered comfortably, and stretched her white arm across the desk, pointing the lapis lazuli seal at the greybeard who held the violoncello on the glossy paper. “That is Karinthy, and he is the wisest man in the world, for he understands Mozart and Beethoven better than anyone else, and they were the wisest men who ever lived. I am fortunate beyond the earliest dreams of my ambition to be playing with him; and we play together, my love, because in the trio, the quartet, and the quintet, we have solutions of a problem that is, I fancy, not unlike the fundamental problem of government that vexes you politicians. Yes,” she conceded, playing a game by chasing his fingers with the seal, “I shall say you statesmen, for you have been very civil to me, and have given me shelter from the heat of the day, and have promised me tea in cups so wide and shallow that I will have to beware lest I turn them over, as I drink, and so thin that I can see my fingers as shadows through them, and so old that the gold patterns on the white ground are as ghosts, for those,” she said, her gaze climbing up and down the walls, “are the cups that go with the house.”

“I will keep my title,” he said complacently, “for my house is well filled.” But because it had seemed to him that there was purpose in her wanderings, that so soon as she had mentioned his political work an unhappiness had come into her face and she had sought another subject to escape from pain, he pressed her, “Proceed with your attempts to lend importance to your art by comparing it with serious business.”

She sighed, held her head for an instant between her hands, and said in a dragging way, “Are you not all occupied in finding a form of government which shall allow that invisible thing, the will of the people, to express its sense of the need for its own preservation, and its traditional knowledge of what subserves this or frustrates it; and which shall not be deflected from this end by the personal interests of any group? So it seems I have heard Sir George declare, in such of his discourses as I have remained, awake to hear throughout!”

He nodded; but to himself, he said, “It is strange that this fundamental stuff of politics has never interested me. ’Tis the negotiation that has ever charmed me, and the struggle for eminence. This is the stuff that occupies poor Saltoun. Well, he must have something to occupy him, for he needs neither to negotiate nor to struggle for eminence. Shall I ever forgive God because I was not born with family and fortune?”

She let the seal roll clattering from her, and caressed his fingers with her own, while she cast down her eyes and went doggedly on: “… And so, you see, there is the same difficulty in finding a perfect form by which that invisible thing, the form of human wisdom known as music, can express itself. To sit alone at one’s instrument is to be like an unlimited monarch. If one can so express one’s personal genius without let or hindrance, why so we can express our personal follies too. For self-criticism is the weakest form of criticism save among the saints, and artists have not time to be saints as well. An orchestral performance, on the other hand, has the defects of a democracy. The conductor’s task, in forcing so vast an organism to unify its conceptions of what it is rendering, is beyond the capacity of all but a few; and since the labour is parcelled out among so many it is inevitable that some should be given parts too small to hold their attention, and if so much as a grain of inattention lodge in the machinery of an artistic performance ’tis apt to throw it out of gear. But chamber-music! Ah, chamber-music!” She apparently felt strongly what she said, for she had begun to rock herself, and a stranger that looked at her through a glass window might have thought that she spoke in distress. “’Tis the ideal form of government for sound …”

He was saying to himself, “… I do not think I shall grieve overmuch because, after to-morrow, Saltoun and I shall be declared enemies. He has dared to despise me. I have felt him despising me. He has despised me for the meanest reason, that I was not born as fully advantaged as himself. He had made allegations against my solvency …” His eyes turned, without his bidding, to a file of papers that stood on the left-hand side of his desk under a small jade elephant, very fine, the gift of the infatuate Lord Ladyday. Sight of them made him feel as if this four-storeyed house were built not on the earth of Portland Place, but on a foundation stone lodged somewhere in the middle of his brow. That was mere feebleness. Had he not long ago discovered that the creditors of a Cabinet Minister would never make him bankrupt, since his fall from office would be a final certificate that they would never see a penny of their money? Yet that discovery, true as it was, did not engender such comfortable feelings as the knowledge that there were receipts instead of bills under the small jade elephant could have done. He passed his hand across the brow and tried to dash the knowledge from him. … “Saltoun,” he said urgently, moving to a more favourable coign of the situation, “Saltoun has no power over the mob. He is a most frozen speaker.” Contentedly he swung to and fro the monocle he wore suspended on a broad black ribbon, but never used. “His lack of animal magnetism makes them turn from him when he is arguing like an angel. How far from me is he in that! Let me speak to a meeting for but three minutes, and then let a fellow stand up and ask what was the wisest question in the world, but one unfriendly to me, and I have but to turn on them my three-quarter face, let my eyes burn, use a chest-note, and they will lynch him. ’Tis such as me the party wants. Indeed ’tis me the party wants! They will let Saltoun go. They will let Derrydown go too. Not a doubt of it. Integrity and his inheritance of tradition once gave him a kind of bleating majesty, that would make a meeting touch its forelock. But his years have worked for me. The brutal mob think him but a silly old bag of bones. And Ladyday! Ha, poor Ladyday! A touch of my ridicule will kill him. Ay, they will never dare to lay their finger on that weak point that I must leave in the manifesto, since I cannot see a way round it. I am of value, and the rest are not. ’Tis true, of course, that were there another war, we would have need of Saltoun. But he would then come back to office for the sake of his country; and I could then better my credit by seeming to have cozened him into returning by the exercise of tact. What a verdant prospect lies before me! But what have I been thinking about? Why, nothing, nothing.”

So talented a negotiator was he that in a trice it seemed to him he had in truth been thinking of nothing. But he was in none too easy a case even then, for he came to the knowledge that Harriet had ceased to speak, and now knelt in an attitude of utter desolation, with her arms cast down upon the desk and her face laid against them.

“Why, Harriet!” he said.

But she did not answer, nor did she raise her head.

“Oh, Harriet!” he cried, and rose from his seat, and went to her, and raised her in his arms. “Come, look at me!” he begged; but the face she turned to him was a blank white mask, on which there was no mark of laughter, or of love.

“My dear,” he said very desperately, “I grieve to see how things come and go between us! I told you when I came in that I thought I could see the tide of the heat rocking against these walls. I begin to think there is more in that than an image, for I feel as if I were a great stone on the bed of some flood, and you a lovely water-plant that grows near by. When the tide flows so, it is well, for that inclines your fair frondage to flow close by me; but while the tide goes t’other way, your frondage flows far away from me. Indeed, if that tide flowed much more strongly, I think it would wash you from your place, and you would go sailing away, and I should never see you any more! It is a great pity, my sweet, when I love you so! Tell me, can I do nothing to set back this most unfavourable tide?”