The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Please, sir, dinner is served.’

  ‘Dinner!’ I echoed. It was nearly ten, but I had forgotten about that much-postponed meal.

  ‘Yes, sir. Didn’t you give orders to have it ready immediately? For two, I think you said, sir.’ The voice sounded matter-of-fact enough, but in my bewilderment I nearly lost all sense of what I was doing. At last I managed to murmur in a voice that might have been anybody’s: ‘Yes, of course, for two.’

  On second thoughts, I left the telephone disconnected. I felt just then that I couldn’t bear another summons. And, though my course was clear, I did not know what to do next; my will had nothing but confusion to work with. In the dark, perhaps, I might collect myself. But it didn’t occur to me to turn out the light; instead, I parted the heavy curtains that shut off the huge bow-window and drew them behind me. The rain was driving furiously against the double casements, but not a sound vouched for its energy. A moon shone at intervals, and by the light of one gleam, brighter than the rest, I saw a scrap of paper, crushed up, lying in a corner. I smoothed it out, glad to have employment for my fingers, but darkness descended on the alcove again and I had to return to the room. In spite of its crumpled condition I made out the note—easily, indeed, for it was a copy of the one I had just read. Or perhaps the original; but why should the same words have been written twice and even three times, not more plainly, for Gertrude never tried to write plainly, but with a deliberate illegibility?

  There was only one other person besides Gertrude, I thought, while I stuffed the cartridges into my revolver, who could have written that note, and he was waiting for me downstairs. How would he look, how would he explain himself? This question occupied me to the exclusion of a more natural curiosity as to my appearance, my explanation. They would have to be of the abruptest. Perhaps, indeed, they wouldn’t be needed. There were a dozen corners, a dozen points of vantage all well known to Mr. Santander between me and the dining-room door. It came to me inconsequently that the crack of a shot in that house would make no more noise than the splintering of a tooth-glass on my washing-stand. And Mr. Santander, well versed no doubt in South American revolutions, affrays, and shootings-up, would be an adept in the guerilla warfare to which military service hadn’t accustomed me. Wouldn’t it be wiser, I thought, irresolutely contemplating the absurd bulge in my dinner jacket, to leave him to his undisputed mastery of the situation, and not put it to the proof? It was not like cutting an ordinary engagement. A knock on the door interrupted my confused consideration of social solecisms.

  ‘Mr. Santander told me to tell you he is quite ready,’ the butler said. Through his manifest uneasiness I detected a hint of disapproval. He looked at me askance; he had gone over. But couldn’t he be put to some use? I had an idea.

  ‘Perhaps you would announce me,’ I said. He couldn’t very well refuse, and piloted by him I should have a better chance in the passages and an entry valuably disconcerting. ‘I’m not personally known to Mr. Santander,’ I explained. ‘It would save some little awkwardness.’

  Close upon the heels of my human shield I threaded the passages. Their bright emptiness reassured me; it was inconceivable, I felt, after several safely negotiated turns, that anything sinister could lurk behind those politely rounded corners—Gertrude had had their angularities smoothed into curves; it would be so terrible, she said, if going to bed one stumbled (one easily might) and fell against an edge! But innocuous as they were, I preferred to avoid them. The short cut through the library would thus serve a double purpose, for it would let us in from an unexpected quarter, from that end of the library, in fact, where the large window, so perilous-looking—really so solid on its struts and stays—perched over the roaring sea.

  ‘This is the quickest way,’ I said to the butler, pointing to the library door. He turned the handle. ‘It’s locked, sir.’

  ‘Oh, well.’

  We had reached the dining-room at last. The butler paused with his hand on the knob as though by the mere sense of touch he could tell whether he were to be again denied admittance. Or perhaps he was listening or just thinking. The next thing I knew was that he had called out my name and I was standing in the room. Then I heard Mr. Santander’s voice. ‘You can go, Collins.’ The door shut.

  My host didn’t turn round at once. All I could make out, in the big room lighted only by its four candles and the discreet footlights of dusky pictures, was his back, and—reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece—his eyes and forehead. The same mirror showed my face too, low down on the right-hand side, curiously unrelated. His arms were stretched along the mantelpiece and he was stirring the fire with his foot. Suddenly he turned and faced me.

  ‘Oh, you’re there,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  We moved to the table and sat down. There was nothing to eat.

  I fell to studying his appearance. Every line of his dinner-jacket, every fold in his soft shirt, I knew by heart; I seemed always to have known them.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ he suddenly demanded rather loudly. ‘Collins!’ he called. ‘Collins!’ His voice reverberated through the room, but no one came. ‘How stupid of me,’ he muttered; ‘of course, I must ring.’ Oddly enough he seemed to look to me for confirmation. I nodded. Collins appeared, and the meal began.

  Its regular sequence soothed him, for presently he said: ‘You must forgive my being so distrait. I’ve had rather a tiring journey—come from a distance, as they say. South America, in fact.’ He drank some wine reflectively. ‘I had one or two things to settle before . . . before joining the Army. Now I don’t think it will be necessary.’

  ‘Necessary to settle them?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I have settled them.’

  ‘You mean that you will claim exemption as an American citizen?’

  Again Mr. Santander shook his head. ‘It would be a reason, wouldn’t it? But I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Instinct urged me to let so delicate a topic drop; but my nerves were fearful of a return to silence. There seemed so little, of all that we had in common, to draw upon for conversation.

  ‘You suffer from bad health, perhaps?’ I suggested. But he demurred again.

  ‘Even Gertrude didn’t complain of my health,’ he said, adding quickly, as though to smother the sound of her name: ‘But you’re not drinking.’

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ I stammered. I had meant to say I was a teetotaller.

  My host seemed surprised. ‘And yet Gertrude had a long bill at her wine merchant’s,’ he commented, half to himself.

  I echoed it involuntarily: ‘Had?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s been paid. That’s partly,’ he explained, ‘why I came home—to pay.’

  I felt I couldn’t let this pass.

  ‘Mr. Santander,’ I said, ‘there’s a great deal in your behaviour that I don’t begin (is that good American?) to understand.’

  ‘No?’ he murmured, looking straight in front of him.

  ‘But,’ I proceeded, as truculently as I could, ‘I want you to realize——’

  He cut me short. ‘Don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that I attribute all my wife’s expenditure to you.’

  I found myself trying to defend her. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘she has the house to keep up; it’s not run for a mere song, a house like this.’ And with my arm I tried to indicate to Mr. Santander the costly immensity of his domain. ‘You wouldn’t like her to live in a pigsty, would you? And there’s the sea to keep out—why, a night like this must do pounds’ worth of damage!’

  ‘You are right,’ he said, with a strange look; ‘you even underestimate the damage it has done.’

  Of course, I couldn’t fail to catch his meaning. He meant the havoc wrought in his affections. They had been strong, report said—strong enough for her neglect of them to make him leave the country. They weren’t expressed in half-measures, I thought, looking at him with a new sensation. He must have behaved with a high hand, when he
arrived. How he must have steeled himself to drive her out of the house, that stormy night, ignoring her piteous protestations, her turns and twists which I had never been able to ignore! She was never so alluring, never so fertile in emotional appeals, as when she knew she was in for a scolding. I could hear her say, ‘But, Maurice, however much you hate me, you couldn’t really want me to get wet!’ and his reply: ‘Get out of this house, and don’t come back till I send for you. As for your lover, leave me to look after him.’ He was looking after me, and soon, no doubt, he would send for her. And for her sake, since he had really returned to take part in her life, I couldn’t desire this estrangement. Couldn’t I even bridge it over, bring it to a close? Beati pacifici. Well, I would be a peace-maker too.

  Confident that my noble impulses must have communicated themselves to my host, I looked up from my plate and searched his face for signs of abating rigour. I was disappointed. But should I forego or even postpone my atonement because he was stiff-necked? Only it was difficult to begin. At last I ventured.

  ‘Gertrude is really very fond of you, you know.’

  Dessert had been reached, and I, in token of amity and good-will, had helped myself to a glass of port wine.

  For answer he fairly glared at me. ‘Fond of me!’ he shouted.

  I was determined not to be browbeaten out of my kind offices.

  ‘That’s what I said; she has a great heart.’

  ‘If you mean,’ he replied, returning to his former tone, ‘that it has ample accommodation!—but your recommendations come too late; I have delegated her affections.’

  ‘To me?’ I asked, involuntarily.

  He shook his head. ‘And in any case, why to you?’

  ‘Because I——’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he exclaimed passionately. ‘Did she deceive you—has she deceived you into believing that—that you are the alternative to me? You aren’t unique—you have your reduplications, scores of them!’

  My head swam, but he went on, enjoying his triumph. ‘Why, no one ever told me about you! She herself only mentioned you once. You are the least—the least of all her lovers!’ His voice dropped. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Where should I be?’ I fatuously asked. But he went on without regarding me.

  ‘But I remember this house when its silence, its comfort, its isolation, its uniqueness were for us, Gertrude and me and... and for the people we invited. But we didn’t ask many—we preferred to be alone. And I thought at first she was alone,’ he wound up, ‘when I found her this evening.’

  ‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘did you send her away and not me?’

  ‘Ah,’ he replied with an accent of finality, ‘I wanted you.’

  While he spoke he was cracking a nut with his fingers and it must have had sharp edges, for he stopped, wincing, and held the finger to his mouth.

  ‘I’ve hurt my nail,’ he said. ‘See?’

  He pushed his hand towards me over the polished table. I watched it, fascinated, thinking it would stop; but still it came on, his body following, until if I hadn’t drawn back, it would have touched me, while his chin dropped to within an inch of the table, and one side of his face was pillowed against his upper arm.

  ‘It’s a handicap, isn’t it?’ he said, watching me from under his brows.

  ‘Indeed it is,’ I replied; for the fine acorn-shaped nail was terribly torn, a jagged rent revealing the quick, moist and gelatinous. ‘How did you manage to do that?’ I went on, trying not to look at the mutilation which he still held before my eyes.

  ‘Do you really want to know how I did it?’ he asked. He hadn’t moved, and his question, in its awkward irregular delivery, seemed to reflect the sprawled unnatural position of his body.

  ‘Do tell me,’ I said, and added, nervously jocular, ‘but first let me guess. Perhaps you met with an accident in the course of your professional activities, when you were mending the lights, I mean, in the library.’

  At that he jumped to his feet. ‘You’re very warm,’ he said, ‘you almost burn. But come into the library with me, and I’ll tell you.’

  I prepared to follow him.

  But unaccountably he lingered, walked up and down a little, went to the fireplace and again (it was evidently a favourite relaxation) gently kicked the coals. Then he went to the library door, meaning apparently to open it, but he changed his mind and instead turned on the big lights of the dining-room. ‘Let’s see what it’s really like,’ he said. ‘I hate this half-light.’ The sudden illumination laid bare that great rich still room, so secure, so assured, so content. My host stood looking at it. He was fidgeting with his dinner-jacket and had so little self-control that, at every brush of the material with his damaged finger, he whimpered like a child. His face, now that I saw it fairly again, was twisted and disfigured with misery. There wasn’t one imaginable quality that he shared with his sumptuous possessions.

  In the library darkness was absolute. My host preceded me, and in a moment I had lost all sense of even our relative positions. I backed against the wall, and by luck my groping fingers felt the switch. But its futile click only emphasized the darkness. I began to feel frightened, with an acute immediate alarm very different from my earlier apprehensions and forebodings. To add to my uneasiness my ears began to detect a sound, a small irregular sound; it might have been water dripping, yet it seemed too definitely consonantal for that; it was more like an inhuman whisper. ‘Speak up,’ I cried, ‘if you’re talking to me!’ But it had no more effect, my petulant outcry, than if it had fallen on the ears of the dead. The disquieting noise persisted, but another note had crept into it—a soft labial sound, like the licking of lips. It wasn’t intelligible, it wasn’t even articulate, yet I felt that if I listened longer it would become both. I couldn’t bear the secret colloquy; and though it seemed to be taking place all round me, I made a rush into what I took to be the middle of the room. I didn’t get very far, however. A chair sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up it was to the accompaniment of a more familiar sound. The curtains were being drawn apart and the moonlight, struggling in, showed me shapes of furniture and my own position, a few feet from the door. It showed me something else, too.

  How could my host be drawing the curtains when I could see him lounging, relaxed and careless, in an armchair that, from its position by the wall, missed the moon’s directer ray? I strained my eyes. Very relaxed, very careless he must be, after what had passed between us, to stare at me so composedly over his shoulder, no, more than that, over his very back! He faced me, though his shoulder, oddly enough, was turned away. Perhaps he had practised it—a contortionist’s trick to bewilder his friends. Suddenly I heard his voice, not from the armchair at all but from the window.

  ‘Do you know now?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘How I hurt my finger?’

  ‘No,’ I cried untruthfully, for that very moment all my fears told me.

  ‘I did it strangling my wife!’

  I rushed towards the window, only to be driven back by what seemed a solid body of mingled sleet and wind. I heard the creak of the great casement before it whirled outwards, crashing against the mullion and shattering the glass. But though I fought my way to the opening I wasn’t quick enough. Sixty feet below the eroding sea sucked, spouted and roared. Out of it jags of rock seemed to rise, float for a moment and then be dragged under the foam. Time after time great arcs of spray sprang hissing from the sea, lifted themselves to the window as though impelled by an insatiable curiosity, condensed and fell away. The drops were bitter on my lips. Soaked to the skin and stiff with cold, I turned to the room. The heavy brocade curtains flapped madly or rose and streamed level with the ceiling, and through the general uproar I could distinguish separate sounds, the clattering fall of small objects and the banging and scraping of pictures against the walls. The whole weatherproof, soundproof house seemed to be ruining in, to be given up to darkness and furies . . . and to me. But not wholly, not unreservedly, to me.
Mrs. Santander was still at her place in the easy chair.

  NIGHT FEARS

  The coke-brazier was elegant enough but the night-watchman was not, consciously at any rate, sensitive to beauty of form. No; he valued the brazier primarily for its warmth. He could not make up his mind whether he liked its light. Two days ago, when he first took on the job, he was inclined to suspect the light; it dazzled him, made a target of him, increased his helplessness; it emphasized the darkness. But tonight he was feeling reconciled to it; and aided by its dark, clear rays, he explored his domain—a long narrow rectangle, fenced off from the road by poles round and thick as flag-posts and lashed loosely at the ends. By day they seemed simply an obstacle to be straddled over; but at night they were boundaries, defences almost. At their junctions, where the warning red lanterns dully gleamed, they bristled like a barricade. The night-watchman felt himself in charge of a fortress.

  He took a turn up and down, musing. Now that the strangeness of the position had worn off he could think with less effort. The first night he had vaguely wished that the ‘No Thoroughfare’ board had faced him instead of staring uselessly up the street: it would have given his thoughts a rallying-point. Now he scarcely noticed its blankness. His thoughts were few but pleasant to dwell on, and in the solitude they had the intensity of sensations. He arranged them in cycles, the rotation coming at the end of ten paces or so when he turned to go back over his tracks. He enjoyed the thought that held his mind for the moment, but always with some agreeable impatience for the next. If he surmised there would be a fresh development in it, he would deliberately refrain from calling it up, leave it fermenting and ripening, as it were, in a luxury of expectation.