Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (23 page)

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 world!”

Two windows high up in the house behind his leaped suddenly to brightness; and it could be seen they had bars. “What, a secret prison in a house like this!” he thought, and was appalled by the wickedness of man. But a white figure, not such as prisons see, showed now before the one and now before the other, opening and shutting cupboards, trailing armfuls of softness. It seemed to be a woman. She opened a door and passed through it
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and was not seen for a few seconds: then came back with a bundle, which, when she had seated herself, she began to unwrap; and though it beat at her, she lifted it high and kissed it. Arnold Condorex stood up and stepped back into the room and looked across at his distant image in the mirror. “That was a nurse and a child she put to bed, and it is evening. See how my opposite wrought in me, to form fears of such simple, natural things as these! For dusk is a sign of rest even to me, since bills are not delivered in the middle of the night, nor does the Cabinet meet, and I sleep, sometimes.” He sank down into the chair at his desk, and sat with his head in his hands. “The power of the opposite!” he grumbled. “If it takes away a man’s power to recognise the night and day, it is time something was done.”

His left hand had pulled out the wide drawer in the middle and his other hand was very busily groping at the back of it. “What are you doing? You are half asleep!” he told himself. “Why, I am indulging a whim,” he explained to himself clearly and loudly, “I am indulging a whim. I have ever heard that when a man has fallen to the depth of ruin, his wife and his friends tiptoe into his room, and steal away his revolver, lest he should escape that way. In this matter I have no fear of my good Ginevra. The idea is a little too complicated for her grasp. But I think that is very much the sort of action that might come natural to my poor dolt of a secretary, who loves me, but is such a dolt that I sometimes feel he will never rise in the world, and enjoy such felicity as mine. Ay, ’tis very likely he would slip in and take my revolver, and then I should find it gone, and for the first time be convinced that my mind knows but will not believe, that my ruin is now complete. So I will put it in my pocket.”

But first he broke it, and saw that it was loaded. “What, all chambers full? It would be prudent to unload it. But no, I am too tired. I do not think another body in the world can be as tired as I am now.” He turned it over and over, admiring its forthright look; and felt a sharp pang in his brow. Indignant with his pain, he cried, “What has made you tired, what gave your head that pain, except your opposite?” and slipped the revolver in his pocket. He began to rub his eyes and yawned, “Oh, yes, you seem tired enough, but I am not sure that you would sleep if I gave you a chance. I think you are too tired. I believe I would be better to go out. Why should I not? I have had no fresh air all day. It is perhaps the very medicine that I need.”

The butler and the footman started apart when he went out into the hall. It could be seen they had been whispering in each other’s ears, their eyes set on his door.

The butler said, “My lord?”

Condorex thought: “When your white face sways in the shadow, it is very difficult not to believe that you are something lying among the weed in that part of the harbour between the breakwater which the tides never truly clean, but only disturb, so that a scum rides on the surf. I perceive I have been constrained to have you always about my house by the influence of my opposite, which would have loved to suspend myself in some such place. I must take steps to end all this injury.” Aloud he said, “My hat and coat.”

For an instant the butler did not move. “Are you going out, my lord?”

The footman, too, was waiting for the answer as if he gaped at a street accident. “Oh, Christ, have mercy on me,” mourned Condorex’s heart. “What have I done that has betrayed my state of vanquishment to those, the lowest of my enemies? The fathomless ill-will that brings me to this plight! There is nothing I can do now save but be haughty!” He nodded stiffly, and said, “Ay, and I do not want the car.”

While he was being nursed into his sleeves the footman moved across the hall and stood by the front door. His dark livery melted into the shadows, his face was pale as a mushroom. He looked to be a tall, thin stalk. “Can he open the door by himself, do you think?” asked Condorex.

The butler’s anger grew stiff upon his collar. “Why should he not, my lord?”

Condorex thought, “What am I at? I cannot tell him that, ever since the night when the lackeys and the maidservants stood in the hall and watched the shining women carry their ropes of flowers down the stairs and out into the street, it has seemed to me as if an invisible rock had been rolled against the door and must be rolled away again before I can go out or come in. For my reason tells me that my lackeys and my maidservants saw no such sight in my hall at any occasion and that two of the properties of rocks are to be visible and not to be in Portland Place, and that all this is a dream instilled into me by my opposite for my embarrassment. Well, there is nothing to be done; and after to-night all will be different. Ay, I have a curious confidence they will be gone after to-night.” He stared into the crown of his hat before he put it on, thinking, “I do not know why, but I have such respect for to-night that it shames me to be covered in its presence. Night, what do I hope you will bring forth that I respect you so? I could almost believe that you might rid me of my opposite, though I have no idea how that might come about. Oh no, there is no way of ridding me of my opposite, none at all.”

He paused at the head of the steps, to puff out his chest at the violet grandeur of the twilight street lest it should perceive he was not good enough or rich enough to live in it; and started back because a greyness slipped between his legs. But in a trice he was straight again, and laughing loud after the habit of royalties and all the overlooked (for he was not sure if he had heard the door close behind him) and had the twisting rag of fur and sinews caught to his bosom. “You are the cook’s cat, I think,” he told it. “And how that woman loves you! For I have complained, and no one would call me unreasonable, of the infernal yowling you raise by nights under my window, and have been told that if I will not have cat I shall not have cook. Ah, for all the pretensions to race that are made by the length of your coat and its orgulous references to Persia, what a vulgar animal you are in your craving for publicity, and, in considerateness, how inferior to man! For have you never reflected that if we men and women managed our business as inconveniently as you do yours, and showed such lack of self-control in lamenting and inconveniency, the world would be pandemonium and no puss could get its nap? What, you wriggle, you ask to be put down? Well, I am sure it is not due to embarrassment, for I have far too often had evidence of your lack of that. What, your pink muzzle throbs in the direction of the area? Ah, I have come between you and your dinner, which is also mine.” He let the cat drop from his arms and stood confronting the twilight with a little more pallor than he had done at first. “How utterly am I lost among the ordinary landmarks of life! So that is why my butler was surprised at my going, since I had told him I would dine at home. Shall I go back? I do not think I shall. They will chatter as much if I sit at my board and do not eat as if I do not sit there. And, believe me, I will eat well after.” He put an enquiring forefinger to his brow. “After what? I fear I am raving.”

He descended the steps, and paused, and shuddered to see the pompous regalia of street-lamps worn by that thoroughfare. “It was well decreed by the Synod of Elvira that lights should not be lit by daylight in places where there are the dead; for the effect is very ghastly, and would depress the spirit of one newly dead, or indeed undergoing any such ordeal, such as having to dispense death.” He shook himself as if to throw off a thought that clung to him, and walked briskly for some yards, then checked himself. “I vow I have not the least idea which way I should turn, no, not the least. Since I am out but to cool my head with fresh air there is no reason why I should go one way rather than the other, and I am like Buridan’s ass between two bundles of hay. Why, I must toss for it, I suppose.” He drew a coin from his pocket, and let it slap his palm. “Heads—did I not say that was towards Oxford Street?” He turned that way, and peace fell on him.

“’Tis the fresh air which is an incomparable medicine,” he mused. “Did I not fear to be recognised and attacked for taking the misfortune of my country lightly, I would buy a stick and twirl it as I walked, and hum. I have the strongest feeling as if I were headed for a successful achievement. I could do more than hum, I could sing. ‘
There is a tavern in the town, in the town, where my true lover sits him down, sits him down
…’ Why, I remember the words and the air to perfection. I must close my lips tightly lest I disgrace myself. Really, I feel very easy, very comfortable. This rebellion put down, I must go for a holiday, and build myself up to wrestle another round with fortune. Shall I go North to the fjords? I am told there are great white mountains that stare up to the sky, and great white women that can do that too, and an air that makes one feel lively, and very noble, so that one’s liveliness excuses itself on high grounds. Or shall I be faithful to the Duchess’s villa, on the hill behind Cannes, which she always lends me, because she believes all leaders of my party to be good men who protect her from being ravished by a boilermaker from the Clyde, and has been deaf for ten years, so that she has not heard the spreading news that I am a villain? Well, the choice must depend on what time of year it is…”

He came to a standstill so sudden that he swayed, and wished he had a stick to lean on, not to twirl. “Why,” his spirit said in a thin voice, “I am now lost in the year as a little while ago I was lost in the day. I do not know whether it is the spring, or the summer, or the autumn, or the winter. A year is a far vaster space than a day. I do not like being lost in this great desert! How shall I find my way out of it?”

When he stared ahead of him he saw the grey curve of Regent Street, for he was not a little distance from Oxford Circus. “Dear God, I wish this had not happened to me here, in view of this architecture that bears the stamp of no age at all. I feel I am lost among the centuries as well, and if all time is my labyrinth, then I must be lost forever! It was a woman and child set me on my right road through the day. Surely some such fellow-creatures will appear now to save me?” He had almost rushed across the street to a crowd of people, doubtless concert-goers, that hurried along towards the Queen’s Hall, but he caught himself back. “Who do you know for certain is not the instrument of your opposite?” he warned himself gravely. “In this matter you dare not depend on any other than yourself. Use that supreme part of you, your reason, to discover what season it may be.” He had begun to stroll majestically again, and at a leisurely pace.

“Let us examine the evidence. It is not a cold day, it is not hot. It might be spring, or it might be autumn. Yet who is to be sure of that? I have known weather as mild as this in December, and I have known a midsummer sky wrap itself in just such an old grey flannel dressing-gown of clouds as this. We flimsy-minded English cast off our heavy garments at the least alleviation of our winter, and our climate is at all times so uncertain that we keep our thick coats by us in the prime of the year; therefore it means nothing that the women are slipping past me not encumbered yet not wholly free. I cannot tell where I am in the seasons. I cannot tell! But I am a fool. I can tell with assurance that it is neither midsummer nor Christmas. For it is growing dark, and it is a little before the hour when my dinner is served. It must therefore be late spring or the early autumn. See how the right use of the intellect will reveal all we need to know of this world!”

Though he tried to walk springily on the balls of his feet his gait soon flagged. “God forgive me for talking like an idiot when He did not make me one! Is this all a man needs to know of his position in time, that he is in spring or else in autumn? Would a traveller be at ease if he knew he were somewhere in North America, or if not there somewhere in Africa? I am still lost I am profoundly lost, and I feel the panic that comes on those who are lost in a vast desert! Oh, but I am indeed an idiot!” He burst out laughing. “That is very amusing, to cry out in misery when I am faced on all sides with salvation!” By now he had reached Oxford Circus; and all round that cold bowl of glass and stone, in which the dust was rising like smoke from the butt of extinguished day, he could see figures that lolled against the shuttered portals of the shop, clad from hip to toe in terse renderings of the world’s affairs. “I have always suspected that money was of more service than intellect,” he said, smiling at his own shrewdness, “and now I have proved it! For by the expenditure of one penny I shall buy a newspaper and read at the top of every page the knowledge that my opposite took from me and my intellect has failed to restore!” But when he slipped his hand into his pocket his face fell, nor did it light up again when he tried any of the others. “It is a most incredible circumstance,” he thought with awe, “that there is at last a breach to the role which has held good with me for years, that the same way of living which ensures that I am in truth unable to meet my debts as the poorest bankrupt shopkeeper, also ensures that I should never go out without having in my pockets as much money as a prosperous shopkeeper’s till would take in a day. My wallet is gone, and I have not a copper in my pocket. It is a pity, for I do not wish to go back to my house till I have achieved my purpose!” Again he laughed aloud, “How pompously I speak! For that is a very Sunday-go-to-meeting way of saying that I mean to take a walk!”