Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy by Rebecca West Page B

singing, “I am rising in the world! I am rising in the world!”
    Then a misgiving came on him. It was as if one, sitting in a fine room he had lately furnished and preening himself because all was well and all was paid for, should see between two of the floor boards a dark pool trickling. Where had he been infected with this monstrous doubt that rising in the world was not the supreme good? Why, that very night, along with some other very disagreeable happenings, in the garden of Harriet Hume whom now he need not see again. “In two days! Sail in two days!” he exclaimed, echoing the old fool’s words. But prudence alone made him speak as if he were appalled; for if a man must buy his outfit for the East and do much other official business in two days, then fitly he may say good-bye to a lady, with whom in any case he has exchanged no serious vows, by telephone.
    Yet that was not how he said good-bye to her, though, God knows, that was how he tried to do it. Panic prevented him. For several times the next morning he gave her number to the dark capricious instrument, but it became no channel for the sirop of her voice and continued to make its own animal noises. On the fifth occasion he said to himself, “This is strange, for at this hour she is usually at her piano,” and then the sweat stood on his forehead as it had done the evening before, when he went from her gate. During the night his will, having no fancy for what had happened on the previous day in Harriet’s garden, had been busy unpicking the stitches which sewed together his recollections, and had left them in loose pieces round his brain; but now they seemed bent on putting themselves together in the same abhorred shape. For was it not that Harriet was able to tell through her new clairvoyant powers that it was he who caused her telephone to make its angry pheasant-whirr; and for that reason was now sitting still upon her stool, her hands suspended above the keys of the piano, her mouth trembling as she wished that he who had ruined her peace yesternight would leave her quiet to-day? He groaned; and immediately knew himself a fool. For calm fell on the growling in the ebonite, and little Harriet said “Halloa” as cheerful as a sparrow. Oh, he had dreamt all this about clairvoyance. She gave a great many “Ohs” and “Ahs” to his great news, and seemed to understand most amiably that he had no time to pay a farewell visit to her, and tittered very prettily when he spoke of the previous afternoon. “All’s well that ends well!” said he, putting down the instrument and sitting back in his chair.
    But had it ended well? He started forward because a dread had pinched him that all was very ill, that he had veritably witnessed a suspension of the proper order of nature, and that he had trodden a flower to the ground very brutally because of it. For had she not answered the telephone only because her sight into his thoughts had told her he was suspecting why she did not answer it? He snatched up the instrument and again gave it her number; and the instant after he and she knew that most abstract form of confrontation which happens when two people stand with receivers to ear and transmitters to mouth but do not speak. “If my dream be true and no phrensy,” he thought wildly, and with cunning, “she will say ‘Yes, you may come to tea to-day’ before I have asked it of her,” but there was silence broken only by such a faint noise as a mouse might make, not knowing what to do, until it struck him that she knew he was putting her to this test and was at her wits’ end to guess what was wisest, When he rapped out his request aloud he had a frightful sense that he was making it a second time, and that she acceded with the patness of one who has thought a question over.
    Yet surely his dream was phrensy. When he came down to Blennerhassett House that afternoon with a stack of roses from a truly magnificent florist (he had begun to spend his money