CHAPTER XV

MISS HITCHENER

Hogg, now fully reconciled with his family, returned to London after a year’s exile at York to finish his law studies.

One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the house. Then this door was flung violently back against the wall, so that the whole building shook; Hogg recalled a pair of luminous eyes, a tall and stooping figure. . . .

“If Shelley were still friends with me, I should imagine . . .”

Some one rushing upstairs recalled rapid footsteps heard long ago on an Oxford staircase.

“No one but Shelley ever ran upstairs like that!”

The room-door opened, and there Shelley stood, hatless, with shirt-collar wide open, wild-looking, intellectual, always the image of some heavenly spirit come down to earth by mistake.

“I got your address from your ‘special pleader’ fellow, and not without trouble! He took me for a swindler of some kind and didn’t want to give it to me. What has become of you all this last year? . . . I’ve just got back from Ireland. . . . I went to preach humanity to the Irish Catholics. . . . Then we returned to Wales, a lovely country. . . . Harriet’s all right . . . she expects a child. . . . Have you read Berkeley? . . . At this moment I’m reading Helvetius . . . very clever, but dry stuff. . . .”

Hogg looked at him with the admiration, affection, and irony, of former days. Who but Shelley would start off to discuss Helvetius with a friend from whom he had parted on such bad terms a year back?

Shelley, full of animation and joy, walked about the room, opened books, put questions to which he never waited the answers, and seemed to have forgotten completely that Hogg had ever offended him.

He talked far into the night, and the men in the chambers next to Hogg knocked furiously on the walls to warn him that the high and piercing voice of his visitor prevented them from sleeping.

Hogg, alarmed for his good name, suggested Shelley should go. Shelley continued to talk. He explained that he had just opened a subscription list to finish a dyke which would enable the Welsh at Tremadoc to regain 5,000 acres of land from the sea. He had headed the list with £100 and he was devoting his life, his strength, and his fortune to the enterprise. . . . Hogg taking him gently by the arm led him to the door, but he resisted.

“Your neighbours bore me! They are brutes who don’t understand that it is only during the night that the soul feels really free.”

Hogg had managed to get him out upon the landing.

“I’ll go, but on one condition, and that is that you come and dine with us to-morrow. Harriet will be delighted to see you. I apologize for having a horrible creature with us, Miss Hitchener . . . but she will be leaving in a day or two.”

“Miss Hitchener? The sister of your soul?”

“_She_, the sister of my soul?” cried Shelley. “She’s a crawling and contemptible worm. . . . We call her the Brown Demon.”

But they had now reached the street. Hogg gently pushed his friend out of the house and closed the door behind him.

* * *

Next day at six o’clock, Hogg sent in his name to Harriet. She received him with enthusiasm. She looked younger, more blooming, and lovelier than ever.

“What a separation this has been!” she said. “But it will not happen again. We are now going to live in London for ever!”

Eliza sat apart in haughty silence. She gave Hogg a limp hand, without condescending to speak to him.

“You’re looking delightfully well, Harriet.”

“She? Oh, no, poor dear thing!” said Eliza in a lackadaisical voice. “Her nerves are in a fearful state. Most dreadfully shattered!”

Hogg thought, “Nothing is changed in this house, one must take care what one says.”

Shelley at this moment burst into the room like a cannon ball, and dinner was brought up.

After dinner there were mysterious whisperings from Eliza into Harriet’s ear, who came obediently to bid Hogg good night, and to invite him to come again on Sunday morning.

“It’s the day the Brown Demon is going, conversation will be so difficult. But you are always such good fun, you would be the greatest help to us. . . . Percy has told you about our Tormentor?”

At the mention of Miss Hitchener’s name Eliza exhibited a deep but silent disgust.

“She’s a horrible woman,” Harriet went on. “She tried to make Percy fall in love with her. She pretended that he did really love her, and that I was only good for the housekeeping. Percy has promised her £100 a year if only she will go.”

Shelley confirmed this. He saw the imprudence of thus sacrificing a quarter of his income, but it was necessary. The young woman had lost her situation through him, and her reputation and health into the bargain, she added, thanks to their barbarous conduct.

“She is really a horrible creature!” he said shuddering. “A superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman. I’ve never been so astonished at my bad taste as after spending four months with her. . . . How would Hell be, if such a woman were in Heaven? And she writes poetry! She has written an Elegy on the Rights of Woman, which begins:

“All, all are men, the woman like the rest. . . .”

He burst into one of his wild shouts of laughter.

Next day Hogg did not fail to turn up. The Heroine of the day appeared to him boring but inoffensive. She was a big, bony, masculine woman, dark-skinned, and with traces of a beard.

Shelley presently declared he must go out, Harriet had a bad headache and needed quiet; Hogg’s fate was to take the two Eliza’s for a walk.

With the Brown Demon on his right arm, and the Black Diamond, as he nicknamed Eliza Westbrook, on his left, he directed their steps towards St. James’s Park. “I could say, like Cornelia: ‘These are my jewels!’” he thought.

The two fair rivals attacked each other across him in phrases of haughty contempt. The languishing Eliza woke up to deal formidable blows with a calm soft acrimony. Miss Hitchener made a show of speaking only to Hogg. She discoursed on the Rights of Woman. Eliza who could not talk on this subject, nor on any other, found herself reduced to ignominious silence.

When they got home she penned Hogg into a corner of the hall.

“How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Harriet will be seriously displeased with you, I assure you! She will be very angry.”

But Harriet merely smiled up at him and asked, “Were you not tired of the Brown Demon?”

When luncheon was over he wickedly led the conversation back to Woman’s Rights, and the Goddess of Reason was at once let loose. Shelley rose from his chair, came and stood before her and fell into animated discussion. The sisters Westbrook looked at him with sorrowful dismay as at one guilty of communication with the enemy.

Eliza whispered to Hogg, “If you only knew how dirty she is you wouldn’t go near her!”

But the moment of release came when the exile’s bags and boxes were piled into a hackney-coach, and the women of Shelley’s household were left dancing and singing for joy.