The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘You mean, before you f——’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t faint. Everything goes dim and dark, but it’s all over in a minute. If I fainted, there might be something wrong with my heart, and that would be serious and—and interfere with my work perhaps.’

  ‘But surely your attacks interfere with your work as it is?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Only at odd times,’ said Mr. Amber, ‘If my heart was affected I should have to stay in bed like my Aunt Edith; she was my last relation left in the world, and she was bedridden for years.’

  Sir Sigismund Keen fingered the stethoscope that lay on the table by his hand. But seeing a look of apprehension on his patient’s face he let it drop and said tentatively, ‘I could examine you quite easily without this.’

  Alarm made Mr. Amber voluble.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you could, Sir Sigismund. To a specialist of your standing the inventions of science must seem merely figureheads.’ Anxiety to convey his sense of Sir Sigismund’s superiority to ordinary practitioners almost choked Mr. Amber’s utterance, and he went on more slowly. ‘That’s why I came to you. I knew you would be able to tell at a glance what . . . what kind of tonic would be best for me.’

  Sir Sigismund did not raise his eyes from the blotting-paper on which he was scribbling.

  ‘Yes, I can tell something.’

  Mr. Amber’s face showed a momentary discouragement; but he said with a forced cheerfulness: ‘But it isn’t anything serious, is it? Whereas if I had called in Dr. Wormwood, my own doctor, he would have insisted on examining me and then it would have been revealed’ (Mr. Amber’s voice dropped at the word) ‘that I had angina pectoris and perhaps even pericarditis and hypertrophy as well.’

  Sir Sigismund rose.

  ‘I can assure you, Mr. Amber, that a medical examination doesn’t necessarily reveal the presence of any of those disorders; and cases of the three being found together would be, to say the least, extremely rare.’ He continued very kindly: ‘You worry too much about yourself. You are——’

  ‘A hypochondriac,’ interposed Mr. Amber eagerly.

  ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t say that,’ said the doctor. ‘But it is evident from your unusual familiarity with medical terms and your—your apt use of them, that you have been uneasy about your health. Indeed, you told me so yourself.’

  ‘I read about diseases for pleasure!’ said Mr. Amber simply. ‘But of course it is hard when you have so many of the symptoms, not to feel that you must have at any rate one or two of the diseases.’

  Sir Sigismund Keen squared his shoulders against the chimney-piece.

  ‘That is exactly my point. If I gave you my word of honour that you weren’t such an exceptional victim of misfortune it would reassure you, wouldn’t it?’

  Mr. Amber admitted that it would.

  ‘But before I can do that I’m afraid I must examine you.’ It was Sir Sigismund’s last word.

  ‘No!’ cried Mr. Amber, rising rather shakily to his feet. ‘Why should I submit to such an indignity? I won’t be examined, and take my clothes off in this icy room when I am so susceptible to chills!’ His technical vocabulary hadn’t deserted him, but, swaying slightly, he went on in a more conciliatory tone: ‘You couldn’t possibly want to examine me, Sir Sigismund! I am an uninteresting specimen; they told me so when I was passed for a sedentary occupation into the Army. They said I was a miserable specimen, too. They said I wasn’t the sort of man you would want to look at twice.’ Memories of Mr. Amber’s dead life seemed to rush to the surface. ‘And for all you say, I know you would tell me that I’m very ill, perhaps dying lingeringly! Though it would be worse to die suddenly.’ Mr. Amber’s voice dropped and he steadied himself by the arm of the chair. ‘I only came to ask you for a tonic; surely that’s a simple thing. A good strong tonic. I wouldn’t have minded taking it, even if it had disagreed with me at first! But you doctors are all alike; you will pry into the body of a perfectly uninteresting person, you will have your money’s worth! You shan’t be disappointed, Sir Sigismund. I’m not a rich man, but I can afford to pay your fee.’ Mr. Amber fumbled desperately in his pockets, bringing up a strange medley of possessions and dropping them on the floor; but the effort had been too much for him and he had lost the support of the chair. Sir Sigismund caught him as he was falling and lifted him on to a sofa. Mr. Amber lay quite still. Sir Sigismund undid his collar which was fastened with a patent stud and, as he came round, conducted the examination which Mr. Amber, in his waking senses, had so passionately withstood.

  Sir Sigismund Keen was writing at his desk when the dark dust thinned away from before Mr. Amber’s eyes. He asked if he might have another cushion, and Sir Sigismund arranged it under his head.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the patient. ‘I must have had one of my attacks.’

  As Sir Sigismund continued to write, Mr. Amber slid weakly off the sofa and tottered across the room to the doctor’s side.

  ‘Are you making out a prescription for me?’ he asked in a subdued voice.

  Sir Sigismund nodded.

  ‘Is it a tonic?’ he inquired timidly.

  ‘It will have a certain tonic effect,’ Sir Sigismund answered guardedly.

  ‘I’m sorry I made such a scene just now—you must have thought me very badly brought up,’ Mr. Amber murmured, altogether crestfallen.

  Sir Sigismund described a semi-circle with his head in order to lick an envelope. ‘No, Mr. Amber; your reluctance to be examined was entirely understandable.’

  ‘Then I am very ill?’ asked Mr. Amber. The tenseness of his earlier manner had disappeared and he seemed happier.

  ‘I have written to Dr. Wormwood about you,’ replied the doctor. ‘His address appears to be 19A, St. Mary’s Buildings, Studdert Street, West.’

  ‘West fourteen,’ said Mr. Amber.

  ‘West fourteen. I’m afraid your heart is affected, and you will have to take considerable care—great care. You must go to bed as soon as you get home. . . . Oh, never mind, Mr. Amber; you can send me a cheque.’

  ‘A cheque?’ said Mr. Amber doubtfully.

  ‘It will be one guinea, then. Thank you.

  As the door closed on Mr. Amber, Sir Sigismund rang the bell. A nurse appeared.

  ‘Nurse, I should be glad if you would see Mr. Amber to his home.’

  ‘Yes, Sir Sigismund. Shall I inform the relatives?’

  ‘You had better ask him,’ Sir Sigismund Keen replied. ‘But I forgot he has no relatives.’

  A CONDITION OF RELEASE

  There are things one cannot get used to. A hot bath may, and perhaps ought to be, a habit; it rarely demands resolution; its frequency, within limits, is taken for granted, and, among ordinary people, scarcely commands respect. But a cold bath, however misrepresented by self-hypnotism or conscience, is usually a practice, seldom a habit, never an indulgence. Be the prospect of immersion never so attractive, the reality of it, the imminence even, sets one’s inclinations in revolt. It is a chronic insurrection; the conscript forces of the will—that minion of manliness, respectability’s redoubt—may scotch but cannot kill it.

  But these are paltry encounters, bloodless Italian wars, compared with the campaign which opens with one’s determination to bathe; and I, as with towel draped about my neck, I started on the ‘good’ twenty minutes’ walk to the river, was complacently aware of this inward conflict. In the unwonted firmness—finality almost—of my farewells and in my avoidance of their tiresome sentimental frillings, resolution must, I thought, have been apparent; the snap of the gate was purposeful; my choice of the steep, adder-haunted path to the wood was unmistakable; I evidently meant business. On the reverse slope that dropped more gradually to the river this self-imposed tension gave way to a more legitimate excitement. Gleams of the river kindled anticipation. The brilliance of the sunlit grass glimpsed tantalizingly between twisted branches or framed in occasional openings, made my heart beat faster. I began to run.

  But before reaching the little gate
that led into the meadow I stopped. My thoughts took a gloomier turn. The danger of bathing when overheated was only one of many perils; weeds, cramp, heart failure, the odious oozy circumstances of drowning. My loneliness increased, but I revelled in it; everything led up to it and emphasized it. Better to be drowned, I thought, than to be saved from drowning; fished out of a swimming-bath by an obese instructor, and ‘brought round’ by the relentless appliance of physical indignities in an atmosphere staled by the breath of obscenely curious urchins! Better be drowned than rescued to make a Brighton holiday by some officious tripper, who would wear the Royal Humane Society’s medal and never weary of retelling his exploit.

  In this intolerant mood, feeling that the very existence of the human race was an insult to my self-sufficiency, I approached the little green knoll whose further bank, I knew, sloped steeply to the water, but not so steeply as to forbid one to recline on it and bask in the sunshine. Essential solitude and privacy, protection militarily perfect awaited me in this declivity; a security almost tangible, an exquisite medium through which my thoughts could roam with something amounting to physical pleasure. Reaching the summit, I stopped; for my stronghold had been surprised.

  A man was lying there in the most perfect, because the most unconscious, occupation. His formidable boots, his grey flannel shirt, his corduroy trousers were lying all about. Ordinarily, the thought that so much should be encased in so little gives a pathos to divested clothing; but his had an amplitude, an air of being successfully, if rudely worn, that forbade pity. The impression of size was repeated by their owner. His head, pivoted on a large arm, turned slowly; he said ‘Good morning’ indistinctly down two sides of a pipe, and resumed his reflections.

  Hedged about by his ponderous garments, daunted and almost intimidated by his immobility, I undressed; it was a prosaic business, robbed of all romance. Subject as I was to scrutiny, observed, sized up, I had as little joy of the process as though I were stripping for a Medical Board. The man was intensely difficult to talk to; and his monosyllabic replies had, I was afterwards to remember, a sinister intonation as though he were secretly bargaining with Destiny for my downfall. Mechanically I stuffed my socks into my shoes, after them my spectacles and wrist-watch, and sighed to think that this simple action should once have had all the thrill and significance of a final initiation. Instead of lingering on the bank until the forces of attraction and recoil had reached a delicate equilibrium—without giving the water a chance to get ready for me—I plunged in. The shock of the dive, usually as effective as a night’s sleep in supplying a brand-new set of thoughts and sensations, left mine exactly as they were—small, thwarted and commonplace.

  This was awful. I swam round a corner to be out of sight of the monster on the bank, uneasily conscious that his proximity gave me a pioneering impetus, a confidence in negotiating weeds that I lacked before. The sudden rising of fish, the startling croak of a moor-hen in the sparse discoloured reeds, had no terrors for me. With equanimity I clove my way through slow-moving groups of foamy, closely-massed bubbles, to which I was wont to give a wide berth—thinking them the expiring sighs of men long drowned. The climax of my courage came when I investigated and bestrode a great log. This in other days I would have shunned; its curious conformation in three coils suggested a serpent, and who knew how much it trailed, like an iceberg, below it in the water? I stood on a shelving bank of gravel and laughed to feel it suddenly wriggled under my feet; and I dived in deep water and brought up a huge, pale, fleshy weed. At last, trembling and feeling incredibly weak and heavy, I climbed out on to the bank and reached for my towel. My eyes were blurred, and it was some seconds before I noticed that the man on the bank was partially dressed; still longer before I realized that the trousers he was wearing were not his but my own. He had drawn my coat up to his side.

  There might be all sorts of explanations; there were perhaps as many lines to take. One could not tell from his attitude whether he was a madman, a convict, or simply a practical joker. If he was a thief, why hadn’t he decamped with the clothes? If he had meant it for a joke he wouldn’t have left the job half done. There was nothing, moreover, in his appearance to suggest jocularity. Provisionally, I was forced to conclude that he was mad; and I thought perhaps the question might be thrashed out more amicably over a couple of cigarettes. I moved across to get them out of my coat pocket.

  ‘Who asked you to touch that coat?’ said he. ‘It’s mine.’

  In spite of my surprise I managed to stammer, ‘Oh, is it? Then I wonder if you would very much mind giving me a cigarette? I usually smoke one after bathing.’ I heard my voice trailing away into uncertainty under the look of his eyes.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘it ain’t no——good. I’ve taken a fancy to these clothes, and if you want any you can have mine.’

  I was relieved to hear him swear, it made him more human. His madness, too, if such it were, had method in it; but I was not reassured. Sweet reasonableness, I felt, was the line to adopt.

  ‘I’m afraid your clothes wouldn’t be much use to me,’ I remarked. ‘Mind, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with them. They look very good wearing, and mine aren’t that, as you’ll find, I fear.’ I stopped, once more on a note of futility; his scornful, indifferent eyes held a message that I was beginning dimly to understand.

  ‘You’d like them back, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I should,’ I exclaimed in exasperation; but I could have bitten my tongue off when I saw the look of grim satisfaction—the only expression he had yet worn to which you could give a name—cross his face and die away. He said very quietly:

  ‘That’s how it is, is it? Then don’t you think you’d better try and get hold of them?’

  At last, through his elementary sarcasm, the immitigable hostility of his tone, the carefully maintained purposelessness of his outrageous behaviour, I saw his drift; I was up to his little game. He aimed at compassing my complete humiliation, my unconditional surrender to his mastery of the situation. He expected me to go down on my knees, to grovel, to display all the interesting symptoms of moral and physical collapse. He was more subtle than I could have supposed.

  I began to feel very cold—faint, too, and a little hysterical. Clouds had darkened the sky and lowered it. My sense of the reality of the situation and of the circumstances that had led up to it was lost; and in its place came a consciousness that I had reached an impasse, a cul-de-sac against which thought continually hurled itself, only to fall away bruised. Small practical movements lost their intention and faltered into meaningless gestures. To convince myself that I retained the use of my limbs I jumped to my feet. The man also rose; and his rising was a fine affair, artistically considered; I was able to reflect that my trousers had never assumed perpendicularity with so much dignity, or participated in such a striking cumulative effect. Any hope I might have cherished of forcibly recovering these garments fell from me. Their possessor’s eyes followed mine round the horizon.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he said.

  I didn’t, nor, as he might have seen, was I in any condition to; but the formulation of this magnificent comprehensive negative riveted, so to speak, my fetters. He came a step nearer.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you can have this nice suit of yours back if——’ He lingered on the protasis like a schoolboy afraid of putting the verb in the wrong tense. To give the consonant full play his lips curved back, exposing his teeth, and his eyes, under the stress of unwonted mental exertion, narrowed nearly to slits, preserving long after his lips had abandoned it the sense, almost the sound, of that suppressed condition. I was wondering what fantastic form his proposal would take when suddenly he burst out laughing, slapped me a terrific blow on the shoulder and subsided on the ground convulsed with merriment. Somehow I fancied his heartiness was not wholly genuine. Presently he remarked:

  ‘You can have them now; I’ve kept them aired for you.’ An incredible peevishness, the result, I suppose, of reaction, s
eized me.

  ‘I don’t think I want to wear them after you,’ I said; but instead of the outburst I expected he only remarked:

  ‘Why the hell not? One man’s legs are as good as another’s.’

  Without a word and as though for ocular proof of his assertion he thrust those limbs in front of me, half leaning on his back and half supporting himself with his hands. My trousers sagged round his ankles in an imperfect ellipse. Suddenly, as if impelled by an exterior force, I seized the garment and began to draw it off; but he held on to it with one hand from the other end, shouting ‘pull’ and roaring with laughter.

  What have I done? I thought, as the trousers, released at last, gave a little spring into my hands. It struck me that they were none the worse for being a bit stretched. The man, who had relapsed into something more than his former gloom, was dressing with swift precision like a play-goer anxious to get away before the National Anthem.

  Why had I undertaken to act as this creature’s valet? My recovered garments were infinitely distasteful to me. Just because he would not be at the trouble to remove them himself I, I the injured party, the rightful owner, had stooped to that degrading office. It had been the culmination, the outward visible sign, of my abasement. He had not even asked me to do it. I had nothing to fear. He had withdrawn his foolish condition, he had ‘shown friendly’ after his uncouth manner, as my stinging shoulder still testified. He was just a high-spirited Briton, addicted, perhaps regrettably, to horseplay; and I, incredibly infatuated that I was, had made him a gratuitous offering of my self-respect. Why, I ought to have chucked him into the river and then argued with him from the bank. . . . His voice fell like a sword on the promising infant, my self-esteem.

  ‘Why don’t you get dressed instead of sitting there like the Light of Nature?’

  I made no reply.

  He took a step forward to adjust round his knee that traditional, much-affected encumbrance called, I believe, ‘York to London.’ The movement brought his face close to mine.