The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by L. P. Hartley

  Vivian saw an opening here.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, Ethel, I’ve been thinking over what you said and I had an idea. I’ve had some poison in my medicine cupboard for many years.’ He explained why. ‘Now I’ve put some of it in this bottle of sherry’—he held the bottle up for her to see—’because I believe rats are very partial to sherry.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that, sir, but they’ll eat or drink anything that a human being wouldn’t touch.’

  Again he held the bottle up for her inspection.

  ‘I’ve labelled it “Please don’t touch.” Rats wouldn’t understand that’—he gave a little laugh—‘but sometimes when we’re both out of the house people do come in, window-cleaners, electricians, and suchlike—Mr. Stanforth, a few doors away, has the keys, and I trust him absolutely. You know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, he’s an old friend. It was through him I came to you.’

  ‘I’m grateful to him for that, and for many other kindnesses. But what I wanted to say was someone might come into the house with the best of intentions, and seeing this bottle they might be tempted—one shouldn’t put temptation into people’s way—to have a swig. So I labelled it, “Please don’t touch”.’

  ‘I’m not sure if that would stop them, sir.’

  Vivian saw the point of this.

  ‘There are other bottles’—he waved to four or five—‘that they could dip into. Meanwhile, shall we lay a trap for the rats? And if so, where?’

  ‘In the kitchen, I think. That’s where they like to come to pick up what they can—not that I ever leave any food lying about. But they have a nose for whatever isn’t meant for them.’

  ‘A saucer, do you think? Anything as long as it doesn’t poison you or me.’

  ‘I know exactly what, sir. That little Chinese bowl, it won’t spill over, however hard they try.’

  ‘Well, take the bottle, Ethel, and we’ll see what happens. But be very careful. Hold your breath while you’re putting the stuff in.’

  She smiled at his scrupulosity, and presently returned with the bottle, its contents diminished by an eighth.

  *

  Vivian couldn’t cook for himself, except a breakfast egg which Ethel generally cooked for him. For his main meals he went out to his club, to which he invited friends, if he had not been lucky enough to be invited by them. Otherwise he lunched or dined alone, in solitary state.

  Sometimes, however, he went into the kitchen in case there was some tit-bit that Ethel had bought for him which didn’t need cooking. He rather enjoyed these exploratory visits to the fridge. But today—the day of the rat-hunt—having been asked out to dinner, he lunched at his club and didn’t go into the kitchen.

  The next morning, after a better night than the last, he was greeted by Ethel with a radiant face.

  ‘Do you know what’s happened, sir?’

  Vivian was mystified.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like to see?’

  Vivian, having no idea what he was going to see, said ‘Yes, of course.’

  After a short interval the door opened and Ethel appeared, with glowing face, holding by its tail an enormous rat, cat-like in size.

  ‘I found it this morning, sir, close by the bowl. It must have been thirsty, because the bowl was half empty, but it couldn’t get any further because the poison had done its work. It didn’t suffer at all, so you needn’t think about that. I’m going to show it to the man what collects the garbage and ask him if he’s ever seen such a big one. But I think we ought to put some more sherry in the bowl, in case another comes along.’

  The next morning another rodent sherry-addict did come along, and suffered the same fate as its predecessor; it wasn’t quite so large, but suspended by its tail it made a considerable impression on Vivian, reclining on his bed.

  For two or three days there were no more rodent casualties, and then appeared another larger than the other two.

  ‘They’re the talk of the whole mews,’ Ethel said. ‘Everyone here has rats in one way or another, and they all want to know how you get rid of them. I told them you had a secret, but I wouldn’t tell them what it was, sir, even if I knew, without your permission. It’s something he puts into a bottle, I said. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Stanforth himself came round and asked you—he’s that plagued by rats. I didn’t say you would be prepared to tell him, sir, because it’s a trade secret, as you might say, and you’re no professional rat-catcher. But he was most insistent.’

  Mr. Stanforth had a flat in one of the mews houses, and was a very useful and valued member of the little street, because most of his neighbours entrusted their door-keys to him, so that if they lost them, as sometimes happened, he was prepared to let them in, at any hour, or if a tradesman called with goods to deliver, or the postman with a parcel when there was no one at home to receive it, Mr. Stanforth took charge and in due course restored the errant object to its owner.

  Having been there twenty years he was known to nearly all the residents, most of whom availed themselves of his services, for which he charged no fee but received enough in tips handsomely to augment his pension.

  And not only did he know the residents, he knew by name or by sight many of the visitors, many of the tradesmen who served them, and all their daily helps, if they had any. He was in fact a mine of information; he knew far more about everyone in the street than they knew about each other; and being an ex-policeman he had a keen eye for any stranger, especially any suspicious-looking stranger, who invaded its precincts. At the same time he was no night-watchman, and since many burglars, though by no means all, operate by night, he had not been able to detect who were the miscreants who had twice broken into Vivian’s house. He did, however, tell Vivian, with whom he was on friendly terms, that he had a clue and was following it up, ‘It could have been somebody who knew your house,’ he said rather darkly, ‘because after they had trussed you up they seemed to know where to look for everything, they got away that quick, or so you told me, Mr. Vosper.’

  ‘You are quite right,’ said Vivian, remembering with renewed bitterness the long silence that had followed while he was trying, sometimes hopefully, sometimes despairingly—to release himself from his bonds. ‘But I haven’t any friends who are burglars.’

  ‘You never know nowadays,’ said Mr. Stanforth, ‘you never know. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?’

  Vivian had almost forgotten why he had telephoned to Mr. Stanforth, asking him to look in if he had a moment to spare.

  He looked round his sitting-room, hoping to be reminded. ‘Oh, it was this,’ he said, taking the sherry-bottle, and holding it up for Mr. Stanforth’s inspection. ‘It contains some stuff l use to poison the rats.’

  Mr. Stanforth’s eyes brightened as he took the bottle from Vivian’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Of course I’ve heard about it, sir,’ he said excitedly. ‘We’ve all heard about it, and how you’ve used it to get rid of a dozen rats.’

  ‘Well, not a dozen, but five or six.’

  Mr. Stanforth looked disappointed at this reduced number of casualties. ‘They’re a perfect pest in these old-time dwellings. I suffer from them myself, so I know.’ With his hand on the cork he asked, ‘Can I take a sniff, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vivian, ‘but careful, careful, it’s rather dangerous, so I put this on it’—and he pointed to the label, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,—‘in case someone should come in while I’m out, and be tempted to take a swig. You mustn’t put temptation into people’s way. You Mr. Stanforth know who can be trusted and who can’t, but present company excepted, we all fall into temptation sometimes, especially working-men who get thirsty delivering goods—’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr. Vosper, I know what you mean.’

  ‘You keep tabs on them, as far as you can, but you can’t be answerable for everyone, so I thought I’d just tell you.’

  ‘Quite right, sir, and I’ll drop a hint where I think it might be useful.’ He pau
sed. ‘You haven’t got the recipe, sir? There are quite a lot of our neighbours, not to mention me, who are plagued with rats, and I’m sometimes asked, “How does Mr. Vosper get rid of his?”.’

  Vivian hesitated before he explained. ‘But the cyanide is hard to get hold of in these days. It happened I had some by me from when I was a butterfly-collector. Chemists are pretty strict about it now. But there’s no harm in trying.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, sir. You don’t mind if I mention this to some of the others who are plagued by rats?’

  ‘Oh no, Mr. Stanforth, but just warn them that the stuff is dangerous.’

  *

  Days passed and nothing happened to disturb the harmony of Rateable House (as Vivian’s dwelling was bitterly called). No more rats; doubtless being the most intelligent of animals, with an instinct for survival which we have lost, they had informed their fellows that Rateable House was a place to be avoided. No more scratching and scurrying behind the wainscot; no more wondering if it was a rat or a mouse, or something less tangible but more horrid.

  The disappearance of the rats had one effect which Vivian didn’t know whether to regret or not: it had taken away Ethel’s one subject of conversation. Sometimes she forgot and began, ‘If it wasn’t for those awful rats—and then, remembering they no longer existed, fell into an offended silence, as if their absence was an even greater grievance than their presence. ‘Those rats,’ she once said enigmatically, ‘did help to keep burglars away.’

  ‘How do you mean, Ethel?’

  ‘Well, most burglars are frightened of rats, just as you and I are.’

  ‘So they may be, but they can’t tell from outside if there are rats inside.’

  ‘They have their own ways of finding out. Rats and burglars are much the same, as you should know, sir. They’re both thieves, and they pass on information to each other, we don’t know how.’

  Soon she discovered new causes of complaint, irregularities in what she felt should be Vivian’s fixed routine—clothes omitted from the laundry basket, objects mislaid which had cost her much time, and much waste of time, to track down. But these were only ruffles on the smooth surface of their relationship, protests, demonstrations against his taking her services too much for granted. And more than once she said, ‘I will say this, Mr. Vivian, you got rid of those rats, which is more than most of us can do.’

  Vivian thought the matter over, and the further away the two burglaries were the less they seemed to matter, and the less likely to recur. A fire may happen twice in the same house, but it won’t happen a third time; the principles of probability, though so wayward in their action, for misfortunes seldom come singly, were against it. Vivian increased as far as he could, his antiburglar precautions; he lined his front-door and his two ground-floor windows with wreaths of protective and ornamental iron, as the Venetians, more practical in such measures than we, have always done, and he hoped for the best.

  He realized, of course, that in a ‘permissive’ society, it was the victim, if so he could be called, who was in the wrong. He should have redoubled his efforts to safeguard his property against the very natural and, according to some psychiatrists, the almost laudable efforts of thieves to take it from him. When he came home, after dining with a friend, he surveyed with some satisfaction the intricate ironwork with which he had sought to thwart the thieves in their natural, praiseworthy impulse to get hold of him and his belongings. Permissiveness was the pass-word to today’s society; and little as he agreed with it he felt slightly guilty for trying to stand in its way.

  On the sideboard in his sitting-room still stood, among the other aperitifs, the bottle labelled ‘Please do not touch’. No one had touched it except the rats and they were long ago extinct. When Vivian looked at it and saw the liquid was still half-way below the P of ‘Please’, he felt relieved and also (why?) a little disappointed.

  Then came the night, for it was night about 3 a.m. by his watch, when, the unexpected happened.

  From his bedroom which was directly above his sitting-room, he heard noises difficult to describe; stealthy shufflings, furniture creaking, and occasionally a whispered word. What to do now? He crept out of bed, locked his bedroom door, fastened the window as quietly as he could, and returned to bed though not, of course, to sleep. The telephone was by his hand; should he ring the police? No; the intruders would hear and either make off with the swag or break through his bedroom door, enter (breaking and entering!), cosh him and tie him up. The police themselves said that in cases such as these, where dangerous criminals were about, discretion was the better part of valour. Pulling the bedclothes over his head he feigned sleep and only hoped that the tell-tale ticking of his heart would not be heard by those below.

  Thus camouflaged from sight and insulated from outside sounds he himself could not hear at all distinctly. But, cautiously shifting the bedclothes, it seemed to him that the sounds underneath had ceased. No doubt the burglars had made off, taking with them what their predecessors had left them to take. Yes, the silence was complete. No use shutting the stable-door after the horse has gone; but Vivian felt that without danger to life and limb he could now dial 999. He explained what had happened; and the police officer said they would be round in a quarter of an hour.

  These tidings gave Vivian a sudden burst of confidence, and not only confidence but curiosity. He would like to see what the thieves had actually taken; what they had left would be plain from the cloacal smell when the sitting-room door opened. Holding his nose against that, he gently pushed the door open.

  But before he had time to shut it and flee upstairs he had taken in the whole scene, or some of it, the two masked figures bending over a third whose mask had fallen off, and who was lying on the floor with his arms spread out as if crucified, and his legs knotted together, crossed like a Crusader’s so that they looked like one. The back of his head was towards the door, his chin tilted upwards. He looked like a butterfly on a stretching-board, and as motionless.

  The two men who were bending over him jumped up. ‘We’ll leave him to you, governor,’ said one of them, and before Vivian could answer they pushed him aside, made a dash for the front door which they had presumably forced open, despite its chevaux-de-frise defences, and the next thing he heard, for there was no sound in the room, was the whirr of their car starting up and fading away down the quiet street.

  Vivian had little experience of death and didn’t know whether the chin-tilted figure on the floor was dead or alive. Alive, he thought, for sometimes it twitched as a butterfly may twitch on the setting-board, long after it is dead. A sort of reflex action. But ought he not to find out? A revulsion seized him; why had this ill-meaning stranger chosen to come and die on him, if dying he was, and not already dead. Standing by the door, rooted to the spot where he had been pushed since he opened it and felt the rush of bodily-displaced air left by the accomplices, he felt an almost invincible reluctance to go further, to investigate further a region of experience as unknown to him as it was distasteful, and forced upon him by events. Yet it was not unknown; not many weeks ago he himself had lain on the self-same stretch of the self-same floor, struggling to free himself from his bonds, and growing feebler with every effort. It was an age of violence; but now it was not he but someone else who was demonstrating it.

  Who?

  A knock which Vivian didn’t hear, and two policemen were in the room. The scene seemed so natural, so usual to them that their expressions hardly altered.

  Fortified by their presence Vivian, who had been lingering in the doorway as a means of escape (upstairs? out into the street?), went into the middle of the room, and for the first time looked the burglar full in his upturned face. Distorted as it was, it was the face of a man he knew quite well; not a friend or an enemy, but an acquaintance whom he had sometimes met and exchanged a few words with at cocktail parties. The revelation came as a terrific shock, altering the whole current of his thoughts, and he clutched the table to steady himself.

&
nbsp; The sergeant who was bending down with his ear to the burglar’s heart, straightened himself.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s a goner,’ he said, ‘but we’ll have to call an ambulance. May we use your telephone Mr. Vosper?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Vivian, surprised that the sergeant knew his name.

  ‘They’ll be here in a few minutes,’ said the sergeant, putting down the receiver, ‘but meanwhile may I ask you one or two questions?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Vivian, automatically.

  ‘I must tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘This man was a burglar, there’s his mask to prove it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vivian, looking down with a distaste that amounted to horror at the frail black object. ‘There were two other men with him, also masked, but they made off when they saw me.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ the sergeant said. ‘And now, Mr. Vosper, can you tell us anything more?’

  Vivian suddenly felt faint.

  There was whisky on the sideboard and another glass.

  ‘Will you join me in a drink? But for God’s sake don’t take that one.’

  He pointed to the half empty bottle, and the half empty glass, on the table.

  ‘It’s against regulations,’ said the sergeant, ‘but we won’t say no,’ and the three of them drank their whisky straight.

  ‘Cheers!’

  ‘I take it there’s poison in that bottle,’ said the sergeant, with his glass to his lips. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, for the rats. I’ve had a lot of trouble with rats, everyone in this street has. I’ve got rid of them all now.’

  ‘All your rats?’

  ‘Yes. Eight of them. Nearly all my neighbours have wanted to know my recipe, but they can’t get the proper ingredients.’

  ‘Why? Sherry is easy to come by.’

  ‘Because chemists are more particular now than they used to be.’