The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘I tried to consider my predicament impartially, and relate it to the canons and requirements of ordinary, rational living; and then I began to suffer in earnest, for fantasy in the grip of facts is like a fly caught in the toils of a spider. I could not bring myself to go back on the promise I had made myself; it seemed like blasphemy against myself, as if I was requiring myself to deny my own existence. In vain, as a discipline, I tried to concentrate on what I was doing at the moment, to do things deliberately, and at set times, to make a ceremony of lighting a cigarette, to be critically conscious of the taste of food and wine, to remind myself, when walking, that I was putting one foot in front of another. Many such exercises in realism I went through, yet they had no reality for me—my only reality was in some room in the Palazzo Trevisan which I had begun to think I should never see.

  ‘You know the Zattere and how it faces the long crescent of the Giudecca, with the canal in between as wide as the Thames at London Bridge and much deeper—but I told you all that. I’m getting old, I repeat myself—no, you needn’t deny it, Arthur, it’s the truth and I hope I’m not too old to recognize the truth. It’s a wonderful view but I always turned my back on it, the palace interested me so much more.

  ‘Well, one evening when I had gone out to keep my vigil, about six o’clock I think it was (I usually spent the two hours to dinner-time thus occupied) I was sitting on my stone seat staring at the palace when Antonio came by. My eyes recognized him but for a moment my mind didn’t—he had become an absolute stranger to my thoughts. Then, my whole being welcomed him, I scarcely remembered what had come between us, and for a moment, so potent was his presence in bringing back the past, I could hardly associate myself with the ghost I had turned into—it seemed a dream.

  ‘He was striding along between the brightly-coloured nurse-maids and their charges, and I jumped up with hand outstretched, meaning to cross his path. But he looked right through me, and if I hadn’t swerved I believe he would have walked right through me, as if I had been indeed a ghost.

  ‘Shaken, I sat down again, and for several moments I couldn’t even think, I could only feel contrary tides of emotion sweeping over me. Then I saw that I was facing outwards, looking at the Giudecca, not at the palace, and I knew that whatever my mind might tell me, something more instinctive than my mind had given up hope.

  ‘It was a heavy day threatening thunder, like so many June days in Venice; and in the thick, white sirocco sunlight the colours of the houses on the Giudecca—grey, yellow, terracotta, pink—seemed to merge and lose their proper qualities in a uniform lack of tone; and what stood out was the fenestration, the whitish oblongs and truncated ovals of the windows, monotonously repeated. Except for a dreadful travesty of Gothic, three enormous eyelets beyond the Redentore, scarcely a single pointed arch could I see.

  ‘I suddenly felt a respect for the five factory chimneys, and I looked with indulgence, almost with affection, on the great bulk of Stucky’s flour mill, battlemented, pinnacled, turreted, machicolated, a monument to the taste of 1870, that might have been built out of a child’s box of bricks. A romantic intention had reared it, and left behind something that was solid and substantial and a benefit to mankind.

  ‘I am short-sighted, and as my eye travelled backward from the mill, I saw something which I had taken to be a line of fishing boats moored in front of the houses opposite. But now I saw that it was not masts, and spars and rigging that was veiling the houses from me, it was scaffolding; I couldn’t see the houses, but behind the scaffolding they were there all right, waiting to be repaired, to be cured of whatever sickness they were suffering from; it was just a cloud of invisibility, a temporary eclipse, and it would pass. Only let the workmen get on with their job—don’t take them off for one of your European wars, Arthur—and the houses would be as good as ever. I don’t know why, but this discovery put fresh heart in me; and the uprush of confidence brought an idea with it, as it so often does.

  ‘I jumped off the seat and crossed over to the palace with as much determination as if it had been a fortress I was going to take by storm, and rang the bell as if I had every right to ring it. With the angry buzz of a trapped hornet the door opened, and I was inside. A sigh of fulfilment escaped me, as if something I had long been waiting for at last had come to pass. But where now? Which way? Which of the four staircases should I take? While I was debating a voice slanted down at me, like a shaft of sunlight piercing the shadow in a picture: “Chi xè?” it rasped. Who was I, what did I want? I could not answer either of those questions, I could not even consider them as questions, only as obstacles to my progress. I waved and shouted something, but it did not satisfy the caretaker: she came waddling down her private staircase, almost touching each side, so fat was she. She advanced across the damp flagstones of the entrata and barred my way. “Chi xè?” she asked again and this time I found a kind of answer.

  ‘ “Cerco una signorina!” I exclaimed. “I am looking for a young lady!”

  ‘It wasn’t really an answer, and it wouldn’t have gone down in England: but in Italy it did.

  ‘ “Va bene!” she said, and my mind rather than my eye took note of her disappearance, as if she hadn’t been a woman but a difficulty to be disposed of. Something seemed to guide my footsteps as I dashed up the main staircase: the steps were dirty under the grey and white stucco of the rounded ceiling, and sweating, as I was, from the sirocco. Almost before I was aware of it I had cannoned out into the great sala: I pulled up short on the slippery terrazzo like a schoolboy breaking off a slide. After the gloom of the entrata, the tall windows at either end made the gallery unexpectedly light. A row of doors faced me: I chose the middle one and rang the bell. A man appeared in his shirt sleeves, flanked by two small children who stared up at me with their fingers in their mouths.

  ‘ “What do you want?” he asked.

  ‘ “Cerco una signorina,” I replied.

  ‘He smiled, not altogether pleasantly. “But there are so many young ladies,” he said. “What is her name?”

  ‘ “I don’t know,” I confessed. “She knows me, but I don’t know her.”

  ‘ “What does she look like?” he asked. “Is she dark or fair?”

  ‘Again I had to say I didn’t know, and a sense of the hopelessness of my quest began to steal over me: I felt how silly, and, above all, how unromantic I must look, at my age, looking for a young lady whom I didn’t know.

  ‘ “But you would recognize her if you saw her?” the man asked.

  ‘Again I had to say no; and then I had the presence of mind to add “But she would recognize me!”

  ‘He nodded sagely, as if this was a situation that might easily arise and one which, as a man of the world, and a man of heart, he understood. Excusing himself, he turned away and called to someone inside the flat. A woman came out—his wife, I suppose; she was thin-faced and dark and wore long ear-rings. While he was explaining my quest to her I was again overwhelmed by a conviction of its hopelessness; yet she did not seem to share it; she kept looking at me with quick, measuring eyes as if she was trying to guess, from my appearance, the sort of person I should be interested in.

  ‘ “There are a score of signorinas living in the palace,” she said to me; “would yours be young or old?”

  ‘I stared; it had never occurred to me that a signorina could be old; but of course she could, the word only implied unmarried, and I was old; it was a natural question.

  ‘ “No, young, young,” I cried, “I am sure she is young.”

  ‘The woman smiled and hesitated.

  ‘ “Proviamo!” she said. “Let us try!”

  ‘Fascinated, I watched her ring the bell of the flat next to hers; the door opened, there were explanations, then a girl came out with her, a pretty girl of eighteen or so, who shyly looked me up and down, and then shook her head. Four or five times, at neighbouring doors, the process was repeated; once the couple drew a blank; once they came out with three signorinas all of whom politely looked a
s if they would have liked to recognize me if they could. Between each identity parade my hopes soared, only to be dashed again.

  ‘All at once I realized it was over; no more signorinas were forthcoming; my well-wishers had exhausted their stock of suspects; now it was for me to prosecute my search, and they sincerely hoped I should be successful. I stood a moment encircled by their smiles, and then with Latin realism and acceptance of failure, the smiles were turned off and I found myself alone.

  ‘Twilight was falling. It was thickest where I stood; I might have been in the middle of a tunnel, with a glimmer of violet light at either, end. My excitement had evaporated and the shadow of defeat, which is also the shadow of reality, began to mingle with the other shadows. Again, which way? At which end of the tunnel should I begin? Then I remembered, and was amazed at myself for having been so dense: it was the end that overlooked my flat that I must explore: the inspecting signorinas had come from the middle of the palace, which had no view of mine.

  ‘With this realization my hopes revived. Looking through the four-arched window I could see my own: for once Giuseppina had not closed the shutters and I had the fancy that I could see myself, looking out, looking at something I didn’t know was there, something I had created without knowing it, as the burning-glass knows nothing of the fire it starts.

  ‘A puff of heat enveloped me, and all at once the sala, enormous as it was, seemed airless. How often, in Venice, the sirocco dies away at sunset just when it is most needed, making the nights seem hotter than the days. I did not remember this, but the sweat burst out on my forehead, and I felt my shirt sticking to my back. But it wasn’t only my body trying to throw off something that oppressed it, it was my mind, trying to shake off the riding, driving impulse which possessed it, and which had begun to create, in the near distance of my mental landscape, a tract that wavered and trembled and did not, as painters say, explain itself—an agitation of moving shapes of light and dark, a tangle of branches in a high wind, with sometimes a flash of white among them, like a peeled stick tossed to and fro. You know Velasquez’ picture of the Spinners?—well, it was as if the tapestry in the background of that picture had come to life and all its intricate design was wavering tremulously upwards. I was conscious of reality, like a pillar on each side of me, framing my view, but my thoughts were joined to that unstable centre where the vegetable flames were leaping, where nothing was clearly made out save the fact of flux.

  Resist it as I would, I felt myself being sucked into this disturbance and soon my feet were moving in time with it rather than in answer to my own control—so that it was without really knowing what I was doing or even where I was that I rang first at one door and then at another, asking questions that I scarcely understood, though their urgency and intensity seemed to shake me, and receiving answers whose purport I gathered from the tone and gestures which accompanied them, not from the words themselves. Without knowing how, I found myself on other floors which might have been in another building, so different were they from the sala I had left: where the ceilings were low, the windows square or squat, where the whole plan of the palace had been be-devilled by party walls, divisions ply-wood thin, ingenious devices to wrest from the once noble simplicity of the great structure its last inch of living room.

  ‘Up and down I went, by staircases broad and narrow, and I must have crossed the sala again, though I don’t remember doing that, when I found another entry, another staircase and yet another range of doors.

  ‘By this time I had lost all shyness or self-consciousness: I rang, I waited, I put my question with the impersonal authority of someone asking for help; only vaguely did I register the fact that these doors were better kept and that a different type of person answered them.

  ‘The last door bell was answered by a maid: she stood in the doorway unsmiling and suspicious. She had a pinched face, hard eyes, and hair drawn tightly back.

  ‘ “C’è una signorina,” I began. “There is a young lady——”

  ‘ “Si,” she said, “yes”—and it was like the crack of a whip. “Ma la signorina non riceve nessuno”—“The young lady receives no one.”

  ‘ “Receives no one?” I gasped, and something told me that I had come to the end of my quest. “She receives no one!” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

  ‘"No one,” the maid answered stubbornly, “proprio nessuno”—“no one at all.”

  ‘She was shutting the door on me when I cried:

  ‘ “But I have an appointment with her!”

  ‘ “How can you have an appointment with her?” the maid said scornfully. “I tell you she sees no one, only her family, and, and . . .” She stopped.

  ‘ “And who?” I demanded.

  ‘But she had already changed her mind about telling me, and shook her head saying, “Non importa—it doesn’t matter—it’s not you.”

  ‘At that the pillars of reality seemed to dissolve, and framed in the doorway was not the maid keeping me out, or the wall of the passage behind her, but the green trees undulating upwards in golden light, a jungle in which forms had no time to harden into matter; and before the vision could be taken from me I pushed on into it, past the maid, through the door, down the passage whose terminal window faced my own, to where, on the left, another door stood open and the scent of flowers met me as I went through—met me and strengthened, and then I saw the flowers and the waving stems: they were banked up inside the open window, almost hiding it, keeping out the view, the view of me, keeping out what remained of the light, or I should have seen, much sooner than I did see, for the shadows of the leaves were playing on it and there was no other movement—the bed and the face on the pillow.’

  My friend stopped and passed his hand across his face, whether to keep his mind’s eye clear for its inner vision or to brush the vision aside I could not tell: and then, perhaps with the same intention, whichever it was, he closed and unclosed his eyes.

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked at length.

  ‘No, it isn’t all,’ he said. ‘How kind of you to have listened to me for so long, Arthur! It isn’t all, but it’s all that I feel I can tell—not because the rest’s too private, though it is private, but because I can’t—oh well—externalize it. What happened before, belonged to me; what happened afterwards, belonged to us: it was shared, that was the point of it. You can’t say much about sharing, can you? Not to convey its meaning?’

  I agreed.

  ‘I suppose that’s what I had been wanting all along,’ he went on, ‘to share something, and I did, we did—when I say I, I mean we. It all boiled down to that. I suppose I could tell you, but do you want to hear? Isn’t there something rather putting off . . . unattractive . . . in the spectacle of somebody’s meaning so much to someone else? Isn’t it rather like watching a dog with a bone? You can tolerate it perhaps, but you can’t like it. Besides . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted him.

  ‘Well, I’ve never told anyone. I never meant to tell anyone. But when I’ve got as far as this, I might as well go on. But you will think badly of me. I’m sure you will. You think badly of me already.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Why do you keep imputing to me feelings I don’t have?’

  He frowned at my smile. ‘Yes, but you will. Anyone would, and I couldn’t bear that. Because at the time it seemed . . . well, perfect is a weak word for it. We haven’t seen each other of late years, you and I, but you know enough of me and I’ve told you enough to know what small hopes I’ve ever had of obtaining perfection in my own experience. And it’s the same with me now—a confirmed mental habit is so much stronger than the exception that breaks it. When I look back on that time, it’s as if I was a plain-dweller—old and’—he looked at me and flushed—‘and well, decrepit, looking up at a snow-capped mountain which he can hardly believe that he once climbed.’

  ‘All the more credit to him for having climbed it once,’ I said. ‘He should be proud of that.’

  My friend shook his head.

&n
bsp; ‘I told you of my fancy of the archway, didn’t I?’ he said, ‘and of the indeterminate springing greenness in between where there were no facts but just the raw material of facts, the inchoate substance of experience before it becomes one’s own, well, in her room it was always there—the symbol and the thing itself, you see what I mean? Afterwards she used to have it dismantled so that we could see each other across the canal; but when I came back she would have it rearranged so that there was no need of blinds, but they don’t go in for blinds in Venice—or shutters or anything to keep us to ourselves.’

  ‘So you didn’t leave Venice?’ I said. You stayed on?’

  ‘Yes, that was one of the facts,’ he said, ‘that at the time seemed so unimportant—I hardly remember how I arranged it. I had Antonio’s money, you see. But in her room, there were no facts beside ourselves, everything was beginning, and it began afresh each time I saw her—for her as well as me, I know that, because we said to each other everything we’d been wanting to say all our lives. She was much younger than I was, but that didn’t seem a fact, either. I don’t speak Italian well, but do you know I was never once at a loss for a word—and I said things that I couldn’t ever have said in English. I expect that was part of the enchantment: in another language I was another person.’

  ‘But isn’t all this rather lovely to look back on?’ I said. ‘It sounds as if it must be. So why——?’

  ‘Yes,’ he interrupted me, his brow clouding again, ‘it is, in a way because in memory I can go back, but only sometimes, only as just, now, when I feel a sympathy outside myself that helps me—it’s never come from a human being before—then I can remember what I want to remember, without the rest.

  ‘In July the weather got much hotter—we were quite light-headed sometimes—yet I never felt the heat oppressive, never an enemy. I don’t think I could have conceived the idea of an enemy in all that time.’

  ‘Was there one?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes there was, Adele, the maid. Perhaps I ought not to call her an enemy: she only acted according to her lights. But she was jealous of me, or she wouldn’t have done what she did, or not the way she did it. I couldn’t have told: those Italian peasant women are so secret: she seemed only to want our happiness. How much that depended on her contriving, I never knew: I took it all for granted; my unobserved entrances and exits, and the untroubled hours between. I think I was quite a favourite with the portinaia of the palace: she always greeted me with a smile. She may have guessed why I came so often: perhaps any Italian would have guessed. But there were so many people going to and fro in the entrata and on the staircases, I seldom saw the same face twice. But I never looked much. The moment I was inside the building one thought possessed me. You know how wonderful that can be, Arthur, it’s the only thing that matters, so long as it’s the right thought. Everything else is a kind of stationariness that one shares with chairs and tables, the sense of being a fixture, imprisoned in oneself, never to alter, never to escape from the mould in which one has been cast. But then I had the freedom of a myriad existences, every day a change, a new growth, a new flower, like the plants in the window. And it wasn’t egotism, for I have never felt less self-sufficient; indeed, I was so dependent on the thought of her that if it had been taken away I think I should have literally fallen over.’