‘Stop him!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t let him do it!’ Jane Manning ran to her.
‘Dearest, what is it?’
‘It’s Harry Chichester,’ sobbed Marion, her head rolling about on her shoulders as if it had come loose. ‘He’s in there. He wants to take his mask off, but I can’t bear it! It would be awful! Oh, do take him away!’
‘Where is he?’ someone asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know! In Jane’s sitting-room. I think, He wouldn’t let me go. He’s so cold, so dreadfully cold.’
‘Look after her, Jane,’ said Jack Manning. ‘Get her out of here. Anyone coming with me?’ he asked, looking round. ‘I’m going to investigate.’
Marion caught the last words. ‘Don’t go,’ she implored. ‘He’ll hurt you.’ But her voice was drowned in the scurry and stampede of feet. The whole company was following their host. In a few moments the ballroom was empty.
Five minutes later there were voices in the ante-room. It was Manning leading back his troops. ‘Barring, of course, the revolver,’ he was saying, ‘and the few things that had been knocked over, and those scratches on the door, there wasn’t a trace. Hullo!’ he added, crossing the threshold, ‘what’s this?’
The ballroom window was open again; the curtains fluttered wildly inwards; on the boards lay a patch of nearly melted snow.
Jack Manning walked up to it. Just within the further edge, near the window, was a kind of smear, darker than the toffee-coloured mess around it, and roughly oval in shape.
‘Do you think that’s a footmark?’ he asked of the company in general.
No one could say.
A CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP
The motor-car felt its way cautiously up the little street that opened upon a field on one side, and somehow looked less suburban by night than it did by day.
‘Here?’ asked the driver, peering into the semi-rural darkness.
‘Just a little farther, if you don’t mind,’ said his friend. ‘Where you can see that black patch in the wall: that’s the gate.’
The car crept on.
‘Cold?’ demanded the man at the wheel. ‘These October nights are cold. Stuffy place, the theatre.’
‘Did I sound cold?’ asked his companion, the faint quiver renewing itself in his voice. ‘Oh, I can’t be, it’s such a little way. Feel that,’ he added, holding out his hand.
The driver applied his cheek to it and the car wobbled, bumping against the kerb.
‘Feels warm enough to me,’ he said, ‘hot, in fact. Whoa! Whoa! good horse. This it?’ he added, turning the car’s head round.
‘Yes, but don’t bother to come in, Hubert. The road is so twisty and there may be a branch down. I’m always expecting them to fall, and I’ve had a lot of them wired. You never know with these elm-trees.’
‘Jumpy kind of devil, aren’t you?’ muttered Hubert, extricating himself from the car and standing on the pavement. In the feeble moonlight he looked enormous; Ernest, fiddling with the door on his side, wondered where his friend went to when he tucked himself under the wheel. It must dig into him, he thought.
‘It’s a bit stiff, but you’re turning it the wrong way,’ said Hubert, coming round to Ernest’s side. ‘Easy does it. There you are.’ He held the door open; Ernest stumbled out, missed his footing and was for a moment lost to sight between the more important shadows of his friend and his friend’s car.
‘Hold up, hold up,’ Hubert enjoined him. ‘The road doesn’t need rolling.’ He set Ernest on his feet and the two figures, so unequal in size, gazed mutely into the black square framed by the gateway. Through the trees, which seemed still to bear their complement of boughs, they could just see the outlines of the house, which repeated by their rectangularity the lines of the gateway. It looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower. There was a tiny light in the tower, otherwise the house was dark, the windows being visible as patches of intense black, like eyeless sockets in a negro’s face.
‘You said you were alone in the house,’ remarked Hubert, breaking the silence.
‘Yes,’ his friend replied. ‘In a sense I am.’ He went on standing where he was, with the motor between him and the gateway.
‘In what sense?’ persisted his friend. ‘Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance? In that room with the light in it, for instance——’
‘Oh, no,’ Ernest protested, fidgeting with his feet. ‘That’s only the gas in the box-room. I don’t know how it comes to be alight. It ought not to be. The least thing blows it out. Sometimes I get up in the night and go and see to it. Once I went four times, because it’s so difficult with gas to make sure it’s properly turned off. If you turn it off with your thumb you may easily turn it on again with your little finger, and never notice.’
‘Well, a little puff of gas wouldn’t hurt you,’ observed Hubert, walking to the front of the car and looking at it as though in a moment he would make it do something it didn’t like. ‘Make you sleep better. How’s the insomnia?’
‘Oh, so-so.’
‘Don’t want anyone to hold your hand?’
‘My dear Hubert, of course not.’
Ernest dashingly kicked a pebble which gyrated noisily on the metal surface. When it stopped all sound seemed to cease with it.
‘Tell me about this shadowy companion, Ernest,’ said Hubert, giving one of the tyres such a pinch that Ernest thought the car would scream out.
‘Companion?’ echoed Ernest, puzzled. ‘I—I have no companion.’
‘What did you mean, then, by saying you were only alone “in a sense”?’ demanded Hubert. ‘In what sense? Think that out, my boy,’ He took a, adjusted it, and gave a savage heave. The car shuddered through its whole length and subsided spanner with a sigh.
‘I only meant——’ began Ernest.
‘Please teacher, I only meant,’ mocked Hubert grimly.
‘I only meant,’ said Ernest, ‘that there is a charwoman coming tomorrow at half-past six.’
‘And what time is it now?’
‘A quarter to twelve.’
As Ernest spoke a distant clock chimed the three-quarters—a curious unsatisfied chime that ended on a note of interrogation.
‘How the devil did you know that?’ asked Hubert, his voice rising in protest as if such knowledge were not quite nice.
‘During the night,’ replied Ernest, a hint of self-assertion making itself heard for the first time in his voice, ‘I am very sensitive to the passage of time.’
‘You ought to loan yourself to our dining-room clock,’ observed Hubert. ‘It hasn’t gone these fifteen months. But where are your servants, Ernest? Where’s the pretty parlourmaid? Tell me she’s there and I’d come and stop the night with you.’
‘She isn’t,’ said Ernest. ‘They’re away, all three of them. I came home earlier than I meant. But would you really stay, Hubert? You’ve got a long way to go—eighteen miles, isn’t it?’
‘Afraid I can’t, old man. Got some business to do early to-morrow.’
‘What a pity,’ said Ernest. ‘If I’d asked you sooner perhaps you could have stayed.’
His voice expressed dejection and Hubert, who was making ready to get into the motor, turned round, holding the door half open.
‘Look here, Ernest, I’ll stay if it’s any consolation to you.’
Ernest seemed to be revolving something in his mind.
‘You really think you could?’
‘You’ve only to say the word.’
Again Ernest hesitated.
‘I don’t think there’s a bed aired.’
‘Give me a shake-down in that room with the leaky light.’
Ernest turned aside so that his friend might not see the struggle in his face.
‘Thank you a thousand times, Hubert. But really there’s no need. Truly there isn’t. Though it was most kind of you to suggest it.’ He spoke as though he was trying to soothe an apprehe
nsive child. ‘I couldn’t ask you to.’
‘Well,’ said Hubert, setting his foot on the self-starter, ‘on your own head be it. On your tombstone they’ll write “Here lieth one who turned a friend into the street at midnight”.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Ernest, like a child.
‘Won’t they? Damn this self-starter.’
‘Isn’t it going to work?’ asked Ernest hopefully.
‘Just you wait a moment and I’ll give it hell,’ declared Hubert. He got out and wrung the starting-handle furiously. Still the car refused.
‘It doesn’t seem to want to go,’ said Ernest. ‘You’d much better stay here.’
‘What, now?’ Hubert exclaimed, as if the car must be taught a lesson, at whatever cost to himself. And then, as though it knew it had met its match, the engine began to throb.
‘Good-night, Ernest. Pleasant dreams!’
‘Good-night, Hubert, and thank you so much. And, oh . . . Hubert!’
The motor began to slow down as Hubert heard Ernest’s cry, and his footsteps pattering down the street.
‘I only wanted to ask what your telephone number was.’
‘Don’t I wish I knew! Number double o double o infinity. The thing’s been coming every day for six weeks.’
‘It’s not likely to have been put in to-day while you were away?’
‘No, old boy: more likely when I’m there. Good-night, and don’t let yourself get blown up.’
In a few seconds all sound of the motor died away. The god had departed in his car.
‘Shall I shut the gates?’ thought Ernest. ‘No, someone might want to come in. People don’t usually drive up to a house in the dead of night, but you can’t be sure: there are always accidents, petrol runs out; or it might be an old friend, turned up from abroad. Stranded after leaving the boat-train. “London was so full I couldn’t get in anywhere, so I came on here, Ernest, to throw myself on your mercy.” “You were quite right, Reggie; wait a moment, and I’ll have you fixed up.” How easy it would have been to say that to Hubert. But I was quite right, really, to let him go: I mustn’t give way to myself, I must learn to live alone, like other people. How nice to be some poor person, a street-arab, for instance, just left school, who had come into some money and naturally bought this house. He’s spent a jolly evening with a friend, been to a theatre and comes home quite late, well, almost at midnight.’ And no sooner had the word crossed Ernest’s mind than he heard, almost with a sense of private complicity, almost as though he had uttered them himself, the first notes of the midnight chime. He could not think against them; and looking round a little dazed he saw he had come only a very few steps into the garden. But already the house seemed larger; he could make out the front door, plumb in the middle of the building, sunk in its neo-Gothic ogee arch. He was standing on a closely clipped lawn; but to his right, across the carriageway, he knew there was that odd flat tract in the long grass. It always looked as if something large had trampled upon it, lain upon it, really: it was like the form of an enormous hare, and each blade of grass was broken-backed and sallow, as though the juice had been squeezed out of it.
But the new householder doesn’t mind that, not he. His mind is full of the play. He only thinks, ‘Polkin will have some trouble when he comes to mow that bit.’ And of course he likes the trees; he doesn’t notice that the branches are black and dead at the tips, as though the life of the tree were ebbing, dropping back into its trunk, like a failing fountain. He hasn’t taken a ladder to peer into that moist channel where the branches fork; it oozes a kind of bright sticky froth, and if you could bring yourself to do it, you could shove your arm in up to the elbow, the wood is so rotten. ‘Well, Polkin, if the tree’s as far gone as you say, by all means cut it down: I don’t myself consider it dangerous, but have it your own way. Get in a couple of Curtis’s men, and fell it to-morrow.’ So the new owner of Stithies hadn’t really liked the tree? Oh, it’s not that; he’s a practical man; he yields to circumstances. ‘Well, the old chap will keep us warm in the winter evenings, Polkin.’ ‘Yes, sir, and I do hope you’ll have some company. You must be that lonely all by yourself, if I may say so, sir.’ ‘Company, my good Polkin, I should think so! I’m going to give a couple of dances, to start off with.’
How reassuring, how reanimating, this glimpse into the life of the New Proprietor!
More insistently than ever, as the house drew near, did Ernest crave the loan of this imaginary person’s sturdy thoughts. He had lived always in cramped, uncomfortable rooms; perhaps shared a bedroom with three or four others, perhaps even a bed! What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself! What a pleasure it is for him, in the long evenings, to sit perfectly still in the dining-room, with time hanging on his hands, hearing the clock tick. How he laughs when suddenly, from under the table or anyhow from some part of the floor, one doesn’t quite know where, there comes that strange loud thump, as though someone, lying on his back, had grown restive and given the boards a terrific kick! In an old house like this, of course, the floor-boards do contract and expand; they have seen a great deal; they have something to say, and they want to get it off their chests.
Ernest paused. His reverie had brought him to the edge of the lawn, only a few yards from his front door. On either side the house stretched away, reaching out with its flanks into the night. Well, so would the new proprietor pause, to take a last look at the domain he so dearly loved—the symbol of his escape from an existence which had been one long round of irritating chores, always at somebody’s beck and call, always having to think about something outside himself, never alone with his own thoughts! How he had longed for the kind of self-knowledge that only comes with solitude. And now, just before tasting this ecstasy of loneliness at its purest, he pauses. In a moment he will stride to the door which he hasn’t troubled to lock, turn the handle and walk in. The hall is dark, but he finds a chair and mounting it lights the gas. Then he goes his nightly round. With what sense of possession, what luxury of ownership, does he feel the catches of the windows. Just a flick to make sure it’s fast. As he picks his way through the furniture to the glimmering panes he congratulates himself that now he can look out on a view—as far as the sulky moonlight admits a view—of trees, shrubs, shadows; no vociferous callboys, no youthful blades returning singing after a wet night. Nothing but darkness and silence, within and without. What balm to the spirit! What a vivid sensation of security and repose! Down he goes into the cellar where the gas meter ticks. The window-sash is a flimsy thing—wouldn’t keep out a determined man, perhaps; the new proprietor just settles it in its socket, and passes on into the wine-cellar. But no, the sort of man we are considering wouldn’t bother to lock up the wine-cellar: such a small window could only let in cats and hedgehogs. It had let in both, and they were discovered afterwards, starved and dead: but that was before the occupancy of the new proprietor. Then upstairs, and the same ceremonial, so rapid and efficient, a formality, really, hardly taking a quarter of an hour: just the eight bedrooms, and the maids’ rooms, since they were away. These might take longer. Last of all the box-room, with its unsatisfactory by-pass. It would be dealt with firmly and definitely and never revisited, like a sick person, during the watches of the night. And then, pleasantly tired and ready for bed, the new proprietor would turn to his friend Hubert, whom he had brought back from the play, and bid him good-night.
So absorbed was Ernest in the evocation of this pleasant bed-time scene that, with the gesture of someone retiring to rest, he half held out his hand. But no one took it; and he realized, with a sinking of the heart, that the new proprietor had let him down, was a craven like himself. He walked unsteadily to the door and turned the handle. Nothing happened. He turned it the other way. Still the door resisted him. Suddenly he remembered how once, returning home late at night from taking some letters to the post, the door of the stable, wher
e he kept his bicycle, had been similarly recalcitrant. But when he pushed harder the door yielded a little, as though someone stronger than he was holding it against him and meant to let him in slowly before doing him an injury. He had exerted all his strength. Suddenly the door gave. It was only a tennis-ball that had got wedged between the door and the cobblestone: but he never forgot the episode. For a moment he sat down on the stone step before renewing his attack. He must have managed it clumsily. The door needed drawing towards him or else pushing away from him. He recalled his failure to negotiate the catch of Hubert’s car. But his second attempt was as vain as the first. The door wouldn’t open, couldn’t: it must have been locked on the inside.
Ernest knew, as well as he knew anything, that he had left it unfastened. The lock was of an old-fashioned pattern; it had no tricks of its own. You could be quite certain it was locked, the key turned so stiffly: it had never given Ernest a moment’s uneasiness nor demanded nocturnal forfeits from his nervous apprehension. It was locked all right; but who had locked it?
Supposing there was a man who disliked his house, thought Ernest, hated it, dreaded it, with what emotions of relief would he discover, when he returned from a dull play at the witching hour, that the house was locked against him? Supposing this man, from a child, had been so ill at ease in his own home that the most familiar objects, a linen-press or a waste-paper basket, had been full of menace for him: wouldn’t he rejoice to be relieved, by Fate, of the horrible necessity of spending the night alone in such a house? And wouldn’t he rather welcome than otherwise the burglar or whoever it might be who had so providentially taken possession—the New Proprietor? The man was an abject funk; could scarcely bear to sit in a room alone; spent the greater part of the night prowling about the house torn between two fears—the fear of staying in bed and brooding over neglected windows and gas jets, and the fear of getting up and meeting those windows and gas jets in the dark. Lucky chap to lose, through no fault of his own, all his fears and all his responsibilities. What a weight off his mind! The streets were open to him, the nice noisy streets, even at night-time half full of policemen and strayed revellers, in whose company he could gaily pass what few hours remained till dawn.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 21