Free Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy by Rebecca West Page B

encouragements which man considers necessary to sweeten his toil. That impression was heightened as there thundered along the riding-track beside him a party of horsemen whose faces were contracted with pain at the bitterness of the air, and yet were magnificent with pride at their government of their mounts and pleasure in the speed to which they had compelled them. It increased his already enormous satisfaction with the afternoon that not for more than a minute did he feel that cringing resentment which those who walk commonly feel at the sight of those who ride, since he could remind himself that now he was among the riders, and had himself often caused others to cringe. He rode remarkably well for one who had acquired the art of horsemanship far more lately than in childhood. He need have no anxiety about following the hounds in Ireland. The thought of his progress in this and other matters made him feel himself like a great horse, magnificently sound in wind and limb, thudding down its hooves on soil that Providence had seen was neither waterlogged nor broken by frost, in a gallop that nothing would stop.
    He had intended to go along the Row to Hyde Park Corner, and would have done so had he not seen, whisking into the gate in the railings which admits to the more mannered elegancies of Kensington Gardens, a neat figure, which made him burst out laughing and exclaim, “By Gad! that is Harriet Hume!” He burst out laughing because she was so very pretty, and he did not want her. He did not want anything that he had not got. He had it all. “I must have a word with little Harriet,” he told himself, and crossed the road, for he had nothing else to do, since clubs will wait. Moreover, even seen through the blurring palisade of railings, she was a creature of such special and skimming grace that it was the height of luxury not to desire her because he was about to have as good. “She walks fast, she is like a deer!” he said, as he passed within the gates and found that she was already a small figure at the end of the broad elm walk that leads down to the Serpentine. Gaining on her, he continued to congratulate her and himself by perceiving her quality. “She dresses well,” he said, “she understands her type!” For she wore a little black hat that was three-cornered yet was not so fanciful that it offended, and he wondered no longer why she kept her elbows pinned to her side, after she had raised a muff to her face and buried first one cheek and then the other in its softness. How trimly she was speeding before him, and with what good temper! She was cold, and she desired to be warm, but there was no sullenness about her objection to her state and her desire to change it. Simply she hastened through the air with a movement more dancing than usual and her cheek laid to a muff as amiably as if it were a lover. Oh, she was a good wench, this little Harriet!
    Just then a breach in the trees showed him a vista extending to the very brim of the Serpentine, where certain people standing at the water’s edge, because of the flatness of the shore at this particular point, had the appearance of waiting on a quay for a boat; and a certain disposition of the trees and bushes on the opposite bank, grouped beneath a perspective of spires and towers that seemed inside the Park though they were in fact far beyond its boundaries, deceived topography and conjured up an illusion of a fantastic island to which the expected boat would ferry them. “Is this where we embark for Cythera?” his mind asked him with odd inconsequence and emphasis; and he had an even odder notion that if that were not to be so it was only because he and Harriet had already made their embarkations, and that other selves of theirs than could be seen were even now drifting down a dark stream, their faces pale in a colder and a later hour than this that chilled them now.
    But his mind shook itself like a dog, and he leaped back to his gratifying game of