The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by L. P. Hartley

  ‘Like what?’ Henry asked again.

  ‘It’s like this,’ Bill said, and he looked taller under the toplight of Henry’s study, and almost as if he was wearing uniform, ‘I want to give in my notice. I want to ask for my stamps.’

  ‘But why, Bill?’ Henry asked, aghast.

  ‘Well, Mr. Kitson, you may think it silly of me, but it’s because of Ginger.’

  ‘Because of Ginger?’ Again Henry’s heart smote him. ‘You mean because of the messes he still makes?’

  ‘Oh no, Mr. Kitson. I don’t mind them at all. They’re all in the day’s work, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Then what do you mind?’

  ‘I mind putting him out at night, sir. He claws and clutches and scratches me—you wouldn’t believe it. Not that I’d mind with a human being, I’ve had plenty of people to deal with much worse than he is—after all, he’s only got his claws, and I think he’s lost most of his teeth, but all the same, I don’t like it, sir, and that’s why I’m giving in my notice and asking for my cards.’

  Henry was not too distraught to ignore the dignity of Bill’s resignation.

  ‘What will you do now, Bill?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, well, sir, I shall find something. There are jobs waiting for a single man. I’m not a single man, really, I’m a widower, which is the nearest thing, and I have no ties. I haven’t put an advert in the paper yet, but I shall find a job you may be sure.’

  Henry, too, was sure he would find another job; but where would he find another Bill? It was all too wretched, but he knew men of Bill’s type and they didn’t change their minds easily once they were made up.

  ‘Listen!’ he said loudly, as if Bill was deaf. ‘I don’t mind cleaning up the mess that Ginger leaves and I don’t mind putting him out at night. I know the way he claws and scratches, but I thought that with you who feeds him, he would behave better than he does with me. It seems that he hasn’t, and I am very sorry, Bill, but I shall be only too glad to take him on, eating, sleeping, and whatever else he wants to do—and relieve you of the responsibility.’ (Just as Ginger relieves himself, he thought but did not say.)

  ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that, sir. You have been very good to me, but I shall find a job where there aren’t any animals to work for.’

  At this rather ungracious remark Henry Kitson groaned again.

  ‘I know I ought not to have left the dirty work to you, Bill,’ he said, with the belated contrition that most people feel at one time or another. ‘I know I shouldn’t have, and if you agree to stay I’ll be responsible for everything to do with Ginger, by day or by night.’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I couldn’t let you do that, a gentleman in your position. And in any case, it isn’t that that I mind.’

  Henry groaned again. He was utterly at a loss.

  ‘Then what do you mind, Bill?’

  ‘I mind putting him out at night, Mr. Kitson. He creates so, you wouldn’t believe it, but yes, you would, you’ve had it so often yourself. It isn’t his scratching and mauling I mind, it’s when he purrs and tries to pretend I’m doing him a kindness. I’m not that tender-hearted, but I know what it’s like to spend a night in the open,’ the ex-policeman added.

  Henry’s eyes grew moist.

  ‘Well, I’ll put him out tonight.’

  ‘Oh no, Mr. Kitson, I’ll see to him.’

  But Henry displayed unexpected firmness.

  ‘No, no, let’s leave him indoors. And if anything happens, I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Bill, smartly. ‘Good night, sir,’ he added, on a note of finality that echoed through the room when he was gone.

  *

  Ginger was lying in front of the fire, on one of his rare visits to Henry’s study since he had yielded to the superior attractions of the sawdust box. He purred, as he always did when Henry so much as looked at him. Every now and then he stretched out his paw, as though trying to make himself more comfortable than he already was. Every now and then he half opened his eyes and looked at Henry with what Henry called his ‘beatific’ expression, suggesting his mysterious but not unkindly insight into the past, the present, and the future.

  ‘I won’t disturb him,’ Henry thought, turning out the light, ‘let him stay here if he wants to; and if he prefers the cellar-door he knows the way.’

  At eight o’clock the next morning Bill appeared as usual, bringing Henry’s early-morning tea. He drew the curtains.

  ‘There it is!’ he said.

  Henry had heard this aubade before, but he was always foxed by it.

  ‘Where is what?’ he asked.

  ‘The day,’ said Bill.

  Henry, nursing again his discomfiture at not having foreseen this obvious answer, sat up and looked out of the window. It was a dreary November day, but Bill didn’t seem uncheerful.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve some bad news for you,’ he said.

  Henry tried to collect his waking thoughts. A pall enveloped them. How could Bill be so unkind?

  ‘I suppose you mean that you are leaving?’ he said, stretching out his hand for the teapot.

  ‘Oh no, Mr. Kitson, it’s much worse than that.’

  ‘What can be worse?’ thought Henry miserably, and uttered his thought out loud. ‘What can be worse, Bill?’

  ‘It’s much worse,’ said Bill.

  Eight o’clock in the morning is not the best time to receive bad news, and especially if one doesn’t know what it is. Henry relinquished the teapot and sank back on the pillow.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Mr. Kitson,’ said Bill, with his back to the light, while he was arranging Henry’s clothes on a chair, ‘to tell you the truth—’

  ‘Oh, do tell me, Bill.’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Bill repeated, as if one sort of truth was more valuable than another, ‘Ginger is dead.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Henry, who had envisaged some cosmic nuclear disturbance especially aimed at him. ‘Good God!’ he repeated, with intense relief. And then he remembered Ginger last night, sitting on the hearth-rug and purring loudly whenever Henry vouchsafed a look at him. ‘Poor Ginger!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir, and I feel very sorry about him too. Ginger was a good old cat. Would you like to see him, Mr. Kitson?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Now, or any time. He’s there, he isn’t far away.’

  Henry got out of bed. He put on his dressing-gown and followed Bill downstairs.

  ‘The usual place,’ said Bill.

  It was dark down there, so they turned on the light. Ginger was lying in his sawdust box, looking quite comfortable and life-like, except that his head seemed to be twisted over.

  Henry stooped down and stroked his cold fur and half listened for the purr that didn’t come; then he led the way upstairs.

  ‘He seemed so well last night,’ he said to Bill.

  ‘Oh yes, sir, but animals are like that, just like human beings, if you know what I mean. Here today and gone tomorrow.’

  Henry felt the bitter sensation of loss that we are all bound to feel at one time or another.

  ‘But he seemed so well last night,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes’, replied Bill, ‘but he was very old. We all have to go sometime.’

  An unworthy suspicion stirred in Henry’s mind, but he stifled it.

  ‘And now I’ve got to lose you, too, Bill,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ said Bill, promptly, ‘I’ve thought it over, and I don’t want to go, that is, unless you want me to.’

  A wave of relief—there was no other word for it—swept over Henry.

  ‘Please stay,’ he said, ‘please stay, Bill.’

  ‘Yes, I will, Mr. Kitson,’ Bill answered and there was a surge and an uplift in his voice. ‘We’ve got cutlets for lunch—will that be all right?’

  His pronunciation was rather odd, and he made it sound like ‘cadets’.

  *

  ‘Would you like a drink now, Bi
ll?’ Henry asked. ‘Or is it too early?’

  ‘I won’t say no,’ said Bill, and the light began to glow behind his coal-black eyes.

  PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH

  Vivian Vosper was a bachelor who lived alone in a very small mews house in a burglarious part of London. All parts of London are burglarious to some extent, but this one was particularly so. Twice his house had been burgled, and the second time he had been beaten up and tied up by some masked men and had only managed to wriggle himself free from his bonds after an hour or more of skin-abrasive effort and a great deal of physical and nervous discomfort. The police, when he was able to summon them, were very kind and helpful as they always are; they asked him if he was suffering from shock, and he said No, but he was wrong, for no sooner had they left, promising to do their best to find the culprits, than he was seized by uncontrollable shivers, and felt obliged to call in his doctor in the early hours of the morning, a thing he had never done before.

  He survived, however, and he hadn’t lost much of value for he hadn’t much of value to lose; chiefly the drinks he kept on the sideboard, to which the thieves had liberally helped themselves, before relieving themselves, as in the habit of burglars, all over his sitting room floor. With the help of his daily help, who came at eight o’clock in the morning, he cleared up the mess; but the material stink of it, no less than the indescribable smell of violation that any burglary brings, remained with him for several days.

  Then there was all the bother of applying to the insurance company for the value of the articles he had lost, not only the bottles of drink, so expensive nowadays—but silver, and vases, and trinkets.

  But though he hadn’t much minded the first burglary—indeed he was in bed and asleep when it happened and didn’t know about it until the morning—he did mind the second, with its violence and its sequel of nervous shock, not to mention the loss of objects that he treasured; and like the hero of Poe’s story, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, he vowed revenge.

  It was the story that gave him his idea, for though he had no cask of Amontillado and no cellar to wall up the miscreants, or the ‘villains’ as the police sometimes called them—such a quaint old-fashioned word—supposing he had been able to; he had a few bottles of Amontillado sherry which would serve as a bait. He would doctor them; but how, and with what?

  As a butterfly-collector many years ago (he was now over sixty) he still had a small phial of cyanide of potassium to refresh (if that was the word) the evaporating supply in the white plaster-of-Paris basis of his killing-bottle. In those far-off days you could obtain the stuff simply by signing the chemist’s poison-book; but there was enough of it left to account for several gangs of burglars.

  It was so long since he had given up butterfly-collecting and moth-collecting. For some reason he preferred moths to butterflies. Not only because there were so many more of them—two or three thousand compared with a mere seventy species of butterflies. True, some of the moths were very dreary; there was the Wainscot family, the Footman family, each member of those two families being almost indistinguishable from the other and only of interest in their slightly varied drabness to experts of whom Vivian had never professed to be one.

  On the other hand, some of the moths were very exciting. The Oak Eggar, for instance, with its strange capacity (radar-inspired no doubt) for attracting a husband or a wife from many miles away; there were the tiger-moths, so decorative; there was the lappet moth (lasciocampa quercifolia) which Vivian had never succeeded in capturing. And the puss-moths, dear creatures, with their green caterpillars, aggressive and hostile in demeanour, but with their soft silken tongues making impenetrable chrysalis little fortresses out of the hard bark of a poplar tree.

  And the hawk-moths of course, all the hawk-moths. More than once it had been Vivian’s good fortune to capture the Convolvulus Hawk Moth (sphinx convulvuli), that rare visitant; but never, in spite of diligent study of the potato fields had he ever discovered either the larva or the imago (as they called the perfect insect) of the Death’s Head (acherontia atropos) both of which were said to squeak, if disturbed.

  Looking at the little poison-bottle, so long disused, he thought of these creatures (now, thanks to chemicals, much rarer than they used to be) which he had loved and yet had doomed to an untimely death, stretched out on a setting-board, the wings that had borne them so freely through the air pinned down at an unnatural angle, and when released from the bondage of the stretching-board transferred to another more elegant mausoleum.

  They had died painlessly, of that he was sure; a slight fluttering of wings over the poison-drenched plaster, and all was over. When at one time he had sealed their fate with an infusion, an exhalation of chopped-up laurel leaves, it had been more lingering.

  They had done him no harm, no harm at all, and as he thought of their poor bodies slowly decaying under glass-covered shelves in a cabinet which neither he nor any one else looked at, he did not feel happy with himself.

  But the burglars had done him harm; they had not only robbed him and beaten him up and pinioned him as if he was a moth on a stretching-board, they had callously left him to get free as best he could, or to die if he couldn’t. ‘Ye are of more importance than many sparrows’ Christ had said; and Vivian persuaded himself that he was of more importance than many moths.

  He uncorked the little bottle, and cautiously, very cautiously, sniffed its contents. Yes, there it was, that almond-breathing, aromatic, but lethal smell. He snatched his nose away. Better be on the safe side. The moths and butterflies, poor creatures, hadn’t been able to snatch their noses or probosces away; they had the stopper of the bottle clamped down on them.

  Vivian’s mind went over these old memories, from the time when he thought it was almost a personal triumph to insert a crimson-underwing, its helpless wings held tightly between his fingers, into the lethal chamber, a miniature forecast of the gas-chambers employed by Hitler.

  ‘Why am I doing this?’ he asked himself as, with the cyanide safely stoppered, he advanced towards the elegant, festive, festive, cheer-inducing bottle of Amontillado. ‘Why am I doing it? Is it like me to do it? I have never wanted to hurt anyone before—except a few insects, and I never thought I was hurting them, only collecting them, as so many naturalists have. Has my nature changed? Have I become a different person just because a few bandits from whom half the people I know, people with far more precious things to lose, have suffered more than I have? Would it not be better,’ he asked himself, still with the half empty little bottle in his hand, as he approached the big brim-full bottle of Amontillado, ‘to forget all about it? If it is true, as they now say, that violence is inherent in human nature, who am I to resent being its victim? I mean’—he hastily corrected himself—‘to resent suffering from it at the hands of other people? Of course I’—and he looked down at the innocent-looking poison—‘were to retaliate, it wouldn’t be violence, it would just illustrate the well-known law that every action has an equal and consequent reaction.’

  He took the bottle of sherry and uncorked it. Better drink a glass, he thought, that way it will look more natural. He enjoyed the drink; what a pity (for now his sense of behaving unlike himself was taking the upper hand) to spoil such good wine. Yet spoilt it must be or else—he couldn’t finish the sentence even to himself. He took the little bottle—how small it was compared with the big one—and decanted from it into its large neighbour a fragrant tablespoonful, then corked both bottles up.

  It’s all nonsense, he told himself, it’s just a joke. In the morning I shall feel quite different and empty both the bottles down the drain; but in the meanwhile it would be safer to take precautions.

  Having written on a stick-on label, in the largest capital letters, ‘PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’ he affixed it to the sherry bottle, which he placed in a prominent position on his drink-table so that neither by day nor night could its warning notice be ignored.

  He went to bed but not to sleep, for his nervous constitution being unaccustom
ed to the idea of such a violent emotion as vengeance, avenged itself on him with an attack of acute indigestion, so acute that he wondered if he might not in some moment of misadventure—perhaps when he was decanting the cyanide into the sherry-bottle—have touched the fatal fluid with his finger and ‘despatched his finger travelling to his nob,’ as Meredith once said—meaning, he touched his head. And from his head it was only a matter of inches to his mouth, and then—

  Two or three times during the night he got up and went downstairs into his sitting-room, where he kept the drinks, just to make sure that the bottle was in place, that no mouse, for instance, had nibbled at its cork, for since his butterfly collecting days Vivian had become almost a Buddhist in his dislike of taking life. No, it was untouched and apparently unfingered, though it had begun to assert its presence as if it were the only object in the room. At length, after a dangerously large dose of barbiturates, he went to sleep.

  Next morning he woke with the usual sense of presentiment and inability to face the day. As a rule this wore off when he was up and about; but today it lingered. He must offer some explanation of this bottle to his daily help.

  ‘Ethel,’ he said, ‘have there been any more rats here just lately?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she answered promptly, ‘there was quite a big one in the kitchen and it scared me stiff. These old houses, they breed rats. Ever since I’ve been with you, sir, these rats have been about, and in my opinion they breed here, down in the basement, where we never go, for it’s a darksome place and not nice to go into. If I wasn’t that attached to you, sir, I should have given in my notice long ago, for if there’s anything I hate, it’s rats. And most people feel as I do.’

  ‘I don’t like them myself,’ said Vivian, looking nervously round the room. ‘They give you the creeps, don’t they? And they are so artful, almost like burglars.’

  ‘Yes, sir, and as I’ve often said before, you ought to put down some poison for them. I know it isn’t a nice thing to do, but they aren’t nice, either. In my flat, which is a modern flat, not like this old place, which may be picturesque but isn’t healthy, we don’t have rats. If we did, I doubt if any of the tenants who value cleanliness would stay.’