Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy Read Free

vastly more important things that happened when she played the piano, bit into an apple, was hot, was cold. Arnold Condorex liked that about her reading, liked it as much as the sight of her waist rising straight from the watchspring she made, when she sat thus on the floor, by the neat coiling of her legs. ’Twas not for him to find repellent a disdainful and triumphant attitude to the world on the part of those who had been born with no silver spoon in their mouths.
    Liking a pompous phrase from time to time, he muttered: “… as little human history as a nymph,” and turned away, but stepped back immediately, for there had caught his eye, from behind the stoutness of the telephone directory and the turtle-shell cigarette-box that lay end to end on the bookshelf, three bars of Russian leather that might as well be the tops of photograph-frames. That indeed they were, and he made to pick them up but stopped himself, since one must not be caught prying, and instead brushed aside the directory with his right hand and the turtle-shell box with his left, and looked at the photographs where they rested against the wall behind. The midmost photograph was of a house, a stone house, a farmhouse, perhaps, or a lonely parsonage. No look of county about it. No drive. Patently no gardeners kept. No, he had long come to the conclusion she could not be of very high condition. But a good place, a clean place, as places are in the cold, clean North. That it was there could be seen from the background, which showed hills checkered with dikes to a height that only insane northern industry would climb; and in the foreground the roses were plainly climate-curst. Surely the first night they met she had said something about Cumberland. A grim place for Harriet to live; a grim place even for the woman whose photograph was on the left, though one could see that her handsomeness was stiffened with a buckram of moral purpose that her daughter lacked. Yet to be sure the elder was none the worse for that, since if Harriet had a fault it was that her oval face was almost insipid with compliancy. Yes, this woman was very handsome. What a life she must have lived all her days, shut up in that hole at the world’s end with the man whose photograph was on the right, a bearded creature pretentiously austere, overblown with patriarchy, as avid for opportunities to raise a hand to heaven to bless or curse his children as a prima donna for arias. It would be very gratifying to go to a lonely village and stumble on such a superb woman. He heard through her imagined ears his knock on an imagined door; and could see with her imagined eyes his obscured handsomeness standing beyond the threshold in the night. “I beg pardon. I am lost. Can you tell me where I might find a room? Oh, you are most kind.” In an imagined kitchen he stood and quietly waited till she finished her task of putting the chain back on the door, and turned, and saw him; and bade him sit down, and when he was seated ingenuously moved the lamp along the table nearer him, till his handsomeness was wholly within its bright circle. One would not move until she sighed. Oh, to live for ever. There is so much to be done in the world.
    Sliding the telephone book and the turtle-shell box together again, he moved along to the mantelpiece and stared at himself in the mirror behind it, smoothing back the raven hair that was apt (there was a Levantine on his mother’s side) to lie over his ears in something too like Disraeli’s locks. Give him a neckcloth and he might have been any of the statesmen who were great when Corn Laws and Reform Bills were all the go. He had the right aquilinity of head which was preserved from suspicion of above-earthness by the square shoulders, themselves preserved from the contrary suspicion of peasant grossness by the lean waist, the temperate hips. Also he had the intense black gaze and the dark pluminess of brows, beetling much for so young a man, that are the very