Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (26 page)

He strolled down the lawn towards the house, a gloating smirk on his face. “Now is a mystery explained,” mused he. “I have heard salesmen in shops holding out goods to their customers and saying, ‘This is all silk,’ or, ‘This is all wool,’ and have wondered at the voluptuousness in their tone. But indeed there is a delicious quality in a state of wholeness. I am deriving a most exquisite satisfaction from being all hate, as I am now.”

At the foot of the steps he paused. “Did ever bridegroom go to his wedding-chamber with so intense an emotion as fills my bosom now?” he breathed. “Nay, why should he? For what he is about to do he had probably done before and will certainly do a thousand times after. But my occupation is unique. Since, having but one self, I can have but one opposite, I can never again have the pleasure of destroying it. And what profit I shall derive from it! After to-night all tides shall flow my way.”

Softly he climbed the steps to the little terrace outside the French window; and said into his pocket: “Come forth, my friend, my deliverer.” His lips blubbered on his pistol, his eyes rolled upwards. “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! Oh, all angels! Pour down your blessings on my friend, my deliverer! And now,” said he, getting down on his knees by the window, “we shall send our message to our opposite through one of these slits in the shutters. There is nothing to prevent me from going into the room and doing justice straight and without falderals, but I am feeling fantastical, and it will entertain me to sight the source of my ruin through this narrow space and send my bullet winging through it on a mission. Come, friend, deliverer, advise me! Is this the most admirable slit for our purpose?” Yet when he had fixed his weapon there, a fit of shuddering shook him from head to foot, and for an instant he could not proceed with his enterprise. “What agonies of apprehension the poor wretch must be enduring through her gift of foreknowledge!” he muttered through his teeth; but steeled himself. “And why should she not suffer as I have suffered in my ruin?” he asked wildly; and set his eye askew against the slit, to take his aim and save his life.

But then it was that two heavy hands came down on his shoulders. His pistol crashed to the ground; and as he swung about and tumbled back on his haunches against the shutter, he saw that two tall men were standing over him.

He shrieked with fear.

The two men swayed backwards as his shriek rushed up into the night as if to let it pass, and then bent over him again.

“Oh, God above!” he muttered, squirming and looking from the face of one to another and seeing nothing but patches of white dimness between a helmet and a chin-strap. “Has my opposite not only done me all this spiritual mischief, but has raised up a material army against me also! How very strange you look! Those are very ridiculous, those brass buttons that go down your chest like the buttons on a child’s bodice, and the leather strappings on your helmets are as foolish a device as I have ever seen. But how now! Is it possible that you look strange only because you are so excessively familiar? Are you policemen?”

The two looked at each other with a gentlemanly kind of diffidence. “Ay,” said one, who was the taller and the older of the two. “We are W Division men; and the lady telephoned to the station for us about half an hour ago.”

“I said that the world was chockful of interference,” groaned Condorex; and fell right back against the shutter.

A creak announced that the French window in the middle was being opened further, and they all turned their heads. Into the widened beam of light two hands fluttered like a brace of doves much under standard size, and from within a silly tinkling voice cried through sobs: “Did I not tell you that I knew everything in your mind? And did I not tell you, too, that ’tis my one duty not to die?”

“So,” said Condorex.

He was sitting on the stone now, with his legs sticking out in front of him and his chin digging down on his chest. “And yet I do not understand!” he sighed. “Surely I wrapped up the thought in enough coverings? For I will swear to you that, what with dark talk about opposites and the like, I had completely disguised my intention from myself. I had no notion that I meant to kill you till I saw the moonlight shining on the brass knob of your door.”

“God forgive me,” wept Harriet Hume, “I mastered that trick of yours so long ago.”

He sat for a while so motionless that even himself almost believed he was dozing. The wide beam narrowed and widened a little as her quivering frailty swayed between the windows. The dark garden waited.

At length he jerked up his head and said imperiously to the two policemen: “Officers, do your duty! I will not resist you, or claim any privileges I might obtain by my rank. For bad as I am, and mad as I am, I have never disputed but that you must reign supreme. I know well enough that if you had not been practising that vigilance which has enabled you to prevent me from dealing as I wished with Harriet Hume, I would myself long ago have fallen a victim to some footpad, or perhaps a more exalted enemy, since the old men would have loved to send a grandson against me any day. Hail, law, exercise your functions! Bring out your gyves! I have enough love of order to find a curious bittersweet pleasure in wearing them, since I must admit I am disorder personified. Besides,” he continued, in a more shamefaced manner, “I am that from which a community would in any case, however catch-as-catch-can its standards regarding murder might be, want to purge itself. For I am an ass. If killing were as permissible as eating butter, I still had no need to kill poor Harriet. Now that I have heard her bland though not very intelligent voice I know that she has done me no mischief. It is I who have contrived my own ruin by my own qualities. She was but conscious of them. She did not manufacture either them, or the external circumstances against which they dashed themselves to pieces. Yet,” said he, rubbing his chin and looking before him pensively, “I still feel I have a case against her.”

“Ay, and you have!” faltered poor Harriet, who was so shaken by her emotion that her parchment-coloured skirts kept bobbing back and forth from the window, in and out of the light. “The strongest in the world!”

“I believe,” said Condorex, “that you are generous enough to reveal it to me.”

“Why, what was the use of me being so innocent in this g-g-garden,” she bleated into her handkerchief, “when I had no power to impose my state on the rest of society? I may have been innocent, but I was also impotent. If I had derived a comprehension of harmony from my art, it was a grave lack in me that I could not instil it into others and establish it as the accepted order of life: and I should be churlish if I blamed those who have the power I lacked, and went out into the world, and did what they could or what they knew to govern it. Humanity would be unbearably lackadaisical if there were none but my kind alive. ’Tis the sturdy desire you have to shape the random elements of our existence into coherent patterns that is the very pith and marrow of mankind. Think, my love! You must admit that when you were not pursuing the chimera of greatness, you performed many very worthy achievements that enabled our species to establish itself on this globe more firmly. Did you not see to the building of bridges, the teaching of children, the suppression of riot and bloodshed? Is that so small a thing?”

“True, I was an excellent administrator,” he agreed gloomily. “But all the same I feel guilty beside you and your life spent in contemplation of the eternal beauties. Do not forget that I found it impossible to work without surrendering to the principle of negotiation; and that it led me to murder, and logically so. For that principle forbids one ever to let the simple essences of things react on each other and so produce a real and inevitable event; it prefers that one should perpetually tamper with the materials of life, picking this way with the finger-nail, flattening that with the thumb, and scraping that off with one’s knife and stamping it on the ground at one’s feet; and the most ambitious performance in that line, ay, and the most effective and—” he drew his hand across his brow, looked down on it with repugnance, and with a shuddering wiped it on his coat—“as I now know with every sweating pore of my body, the most horrible, is murder.”

“Ay, but the end of contemplating the eternal beauties, and doing nothing to yoke them with time,” mewed Harriet, “is smugness, and stagnation, and sterility!”

He stared before him into the dark garden, tapping his forefinger against his upper lip. “You put an astonishing good face upon my destiny,” he said. “And what is as important, I feel as if the quarrel between us was over. I feel soothed already; and I have no doubt you could put me right about the universe did I but have the time to hear your exegesis complete. But these gentlemen will be growing impatient.” He rose to his feet and extended his wrists towards the policemen. “Come, officers! Take your prisoner!”

They showed, however, not the least eagerness to obey. They looked towards the window and hesitated; and one of them said, “Do you wish to give him in charge, madam?”

“It is for him to say that,” replied Harriet.

“There you are wrong,” said Condorex sadly. “An attempt upon the life of another with firearms is not such a small matter that the assailant himself is allowed to say whether or not he shall pay for it. I fear that our two friends here will regard the matter in a very different spirit.”

“Oh no, sir,” said the taller of the two policemen. “The lady is right. We will leave it to you to decide whether or not you shall be arrested.”

“What,” exclaimed Condorex. “Do I hear that from the custodians of the law themselves! This is a very disorderly plot of ground, where that which keeps our Constitution rigid shows flagrant signs of laxity!”

“Well,” said the same policeman, “You are the first prisoner I ever saw who was shocked because he was dealt out mercy instead of justice.”

Harriet put her head out of the window so far that the light gleamed on her sleek parting. “Does it not show that there is something fine and unbendable in him?” she fondly enquired of the constables.

“Oh, he is a leader,” agreed the taller one. “If I had to take part in a charge on a battlefield I would as soon follow him as anyone. And when one says that, one says so much that one is a fool if one does not leave a great many other things unsaid, no matter how just they may be. I hope the gentleman will understand that we are feeling nothing uncivil against him, whether he comes with us or not.”

“What happens if I go with you?” he asked.

“Why, we will go to a police-station, in a street off the Fulham Road, and there we will find a whitewashed room with a harsh light under a white porcelain shade, and a man writing at a high desk; and after all that goes by routine.”

“And I have ever found routine dull work,” said Condorex dolefully.

They all stood in silence for a moment, looking on the ground.

The younger policeman, who had a very simple face, cleared his throat and spoke. “You would find a calendar standing on the desk where the man is writing,” he said helpfully. “It will tell you the day and the month, ay, and the year.”

“True enough,” said the elder, “but it is the only thing he would learn quickly. Routine is the most roundabout stuff.”

“I do not think I wish to go with you,” said Condorex, and he looked in a mortified way round the garden, which a nymph-flight of clouds across the moon was filling with graceful and volatile shadows. “But the truth is, I must dispose of myself somehow. I suppose I could walk the streets for a time.”

“What!” blurted out the younger policeman. “A gentleman of your condition! And have the children scream at you, and be sprinkled with holy water!”

“Why would they do that?” asked Condorex.

No one answered him. Harriet drew back in the doorway. The two policemen had had their eyes fixed on him, but now they looked once more on the ground.

“And I could, of course, go back to Portland Place,” he reflected.

Harriet leaned forth into the light again. “I do not think I should do that,” she said quickly. “There is one there who has had an accident with a pistol as he sat at his desk, and they have carried him up to your room and laid him on your bed, and there is a great running to and fro of doctors and secretaries and messengers and such. Oh, no, I would not go back to Portland Place, if I were you. I think,” she ventured, timidly, “that you had better stay here.”

“But surely you understand,” he answered, “that I am ashamed to do that? I should like nothing better. But you are well aware in what spiteful follies I have been engaged regarding yourself. I clean forgot your pretty image about the North and the South, which would have kept me from identifying difference with enmity, and I most maliciously pretended that the spiritual world had been infected by you with a condition of hatred that was entirely of my own making, and you know well what I was at when these two good fellows found me.”

“What is a little matter of murder between friends?” responded Harriet. “Had all gone conveniently with us at the beginning no doubt you would have left me, and I would have had to write you that well-worn letter they read in court, which contains the phrase, ‘I will let bygones be bygones.’ But things being as they are, I have the words by me still for use, and I will use them now. And I hope you will give them in your turn to me.”

She leaned so far forward from the step of the French window that he could see the swan line of her neck and shoulders.

“Dear Harriet,” said Condorex. “If you will let me, I will stay.”

She swayed backwards with the languor of contentment. “There is an end to my anxiety!” she breathed. “For I was not sure but you would find some reason for wandering from me in some new form of stately discomfort, and I am certain that what you want at the moment is some of the quietness we have here. But,” she said, her voice rising to the jesting firmness and her hands bringing the windows close together, so that the beam narrowed to a pointer, “I will not let you in at once, for I must tidy the house, which is something disordered, since I myself have returned only a little while from a long journey.”