The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  The servant who interrupted it, bringing her a card, looked as if he had been there a long while.

  ‘To introduce Lord Henry de Winton,’ she read, and underneath, the name of an old school-friend.

  ‘Tell him I shall be delighted to see him,’ said Lavinia.

  He came soon after, his wife with him.

  ‘Ah, Miss Johnstone,’ she cried, taking Lavinia’s hand, ‘you can’t think what a pleasure it is to find you. You must overlook the shameless haste with which we take advantage of our introduction.’

  ‘We couldn’t help it, you know,’ her husband put in, smiling from one to the other. ‘We had such accounts of you.’

  Lavinia had been for so long seeking rather than sought after that she didn’t know what to make of it.

  ‘I hope I shall live up to my reputation,’ was all she could think of to say.

  If they were chilled they hardly showed it; they continued to look down upon Lavinia, kindling, melting and shining like angelic presences.

  ‘It’s hard on you, I own,’ said Lady Henry. ‘How much pleasanter for you to be like us with no reputation at all, not a rag!’ Repudiated virtue triumphed in her eyes; but her husband said:

  ‘You mustn’t scare Miss Johnstone. Remember we were warned not to shock her.’ They laughed infectiously; but a tiny dart pierced Lavinia’s soul and stuck there, quivering.

  ‘You mustn’t try me too far,’ she said, making an effort.

  ‘You’ll take the risk of dining with us, won’t you?’ Lord Henry begged. He spoke as if it were a tremendous favour, the greatest they could ask. ‘And your mother too.’

  ‘I should love to,’ said Lavinia. ‘Mamma, alas, is in bed.’

  Instantly their faces changed, contracted into sympathy and concern.

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ Lady Henry murmured. ‘Perhaps you’d rather not.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not dying,’ Lavinia assured them, a faint irony in her tone, partly habitual, but partly, she was ashamed to realize, bitter.

  They noticed it, for their eyebrows lifted even as their faces cleared.

  ‘How tiresome for both of you,’ Lady Henry said. ‘Should we say eight o’clock?’

  16

  ‘Why,’ wrote Lavinia, ‘when I meet the most charming people in the world should I feel like a fish out of water? The kindness of the de Wintons goes over my head. I feel like a black figure silhouetted against a sunset. The blackness is my will. I have altogether too much of it. This morning I thought it had died. My life seemed dislocated; I did the things I dislike most without minding them at all. Three hours I tramped Venice to find a propitiatory shawl for Mrs. Evans. Malice governed my choice at the last; she will look a fright in it; but as I went from one shop to another, ordering its entire stock to be laid before me, and then going away without buying, I did not feel wretched and distressed, as I used to do. I didn’t mind what happened. If I had been struck by lightning I shouldn’t have changed colour. Things came to me mechanically, but not in any order or with any sense of choice. Volition was stilled. The de Wintons roused it. They did everything they could to draw me out, to draw me back to their level, their world where I once was, where all desires are at an equipoise, where one wants a thing moderately and forgets it directly one can’t get it; where one can leave one’s spiritual house, as the dove left the ark, and return to it at will. While they talked, appealing to me now and then, weaving into one fabric the separate threads of our lives, finding common interests, common acquaintances, a hundred similarities of opinion and as many dissimilarities, that should have been just as binding, drawing us together until it seemed our whole existence had passed within a few yards of each other, I felt in the midst of the exquisite witchcraft that each lasso they threw over me dissolved like a rope of sand, leaving me somewhere much lower than the angels, alone with my ungovernable will. It frightenes me; I cannot escape it; I cannot find my way back to that region where diversity is real and inclination nibbles at a million herbs and forgets the wolf, will, that watches him. Emilio is nothing to me; he is the planetary sign, the constellation under which my will is free to do me harm. I have devised a remedy. Cannot I in thought identify myself with the outside world, the world that sees with unimplicated eye Lavinia Johnstone going about her business—notes a feather in her hat as she stands on the terrace, sees her apparently deep in conversation with a rough-looking man, jots down her arrival in a newspaper, thinks she’ll be gone in a week, wonders why she doesn’t change her clothes oftener, decides after all not to trouble to speak to her? Then I should recover my sense of proportion; I should matter as little to myself as I do to the world.

  ‘I write like a pagan. Perhaps my disorder is more common-place: it is the natural outcome of doing a number of wrong things, letting myself get out of hand. Sin is the reason of my failure with the de Wintons. The Kolynopulos’ monster, what exactly is it? It’s no use going to Mamma to get rid of it, she said so. I begin to wish that Elizabeth would come.’

  Next morning the doctor was due. Lavinia stayed in to hear his report. Each time she sought the sunshine of the terrace she found Emilio there. His presence wounded her; his recognitions, formal and full at first, diminished with each encounter and then ceased. ‘He has behaved badly to me,’ she thought, injured and yet glad of the injury. Though he avoided her and grudged her his company, he could not take away from her the fact that he, Emilio, acting responsibly with her image in his mind, had wronged her. It was a kind of personal relation, the only one, most likely, she would have. She looked at him again. The sun shone full upon his brown neck. Surely such exposure was dangerous? Suddenly he looked up. With her hand she made a little sweeping motion behind her head. The gondolier smiled, clutched his sailor’s collar with both hands and comically pressed it up to his ears, then let it fall. He pointed to the sun, shook his head slowly with an expression of contempt, smiled once more and smoothed away the creases in his collar. The Kolynopulos’ monster at last came out of hiding and swam into view. Mechanically Lavinia put out her hand and took a telegram from the waiter’s tray.

  Earnestly advise Miss Perkins leave Venice immediately. Alas cannot join you. Writing. Elizabeth.

  Lavinia crunched up the blue paper and threw it towards the canal. It was a feeble throw, the wind bore it back; so she took it to the balustrade and hurled it with all her might. It fluttered towards Emilio who made as though to catch it; but it fell short of him, and she could see it, just below the water, stealthily uncurling.

  The handwriting of Lavinia’s diary that night was huddled and uncouth, unlike her usual elegant script. She had been searching Venice, apparently, for a guide to conduct, or some theological work with a practical application.

  ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘it’s only a Frenchman’s view and one can’t put much faith in them. I thought, if the will is corrupt, that is enough to damn you. Try to thwart the will, try to control it, try to reform it: I have tried. Faith without works is dead: that is the creed of the Roman Church and leads to indulgences. If one has faith it follows that one performs the acts of faith. They are nothing in themselves, have no value except to illustrate one’s faith. Why do them? Because one can’t help it. If the tree is good, so must the fruit be. And if evil? Need it be altogether evil? There’s a danger in arguing from analogy; metaphors conceal truth. But suppose the tree is evil, at any one time; would it be logical to say: “You’re a bad tree; if you don’t bear fruit you’ll still be bad, only not so bad”? The barren fig-tree was cursed for its barrenness, not for the quality of its fruit; it may have deliberately refrained from having figs, because it knew they would be bad, and it didn’t want to be known by its fruit. What I mean is, if the will is corrupt it will produce corrupt acts, and there is no virtue in refraining from any particular act, because everything you do will be wrong, wrong before you do it, wrong when you first think of it, wrong because you think it. But this man makes a distinction. To want to do wrong without doing it is concupiscence: it is
in the nature of sin, but not sin. Isn’t this a quibble? And it’s cold comfort to be told that abstinence is concupiscence, and is in the nature of sin. I wish I could ask someone. After all, it’s an academic point: I can settle it which way I like, it commits me to nothing. However I argue it I shall still believe that the act does make a difference; if I wanted to throw myself off the Woolworth building, and didn’t, it would not be the same as if I wanted to and did.’

  ‘Well, he evidently means us to get out,’ said Lady Henry, looking doubtfully at the deserted campo.

  Emilio was offering his arm.

  Lord Henry strode ashore without availing himself of the hand-rail; but his wife and Lavinia accepted its aid in their transit. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you touch those fellows at your own risk.’

  ‘Nonsense, Henry,’ his wife protested. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, plague, pestilence, dirt, disease,’ Lord Henry answered.

  ‘My dear, does he look like it? He will outlive us all. Henry is secretly jealous of our gondolier,’ she said, turning to Lavinia. ‘Don’t you think him an Adonis?’

  ‘He is a genial-looking brigand,’ said her husband. ‘I was asking Miss Johnstone,’ Lady Henry remarked. ‘This is a matter for feminine eyes. I dote upon him.’ She turned her candid eyes upon her husband with an exquisite pretence of languor.

  ‘Well,’ he gently growled, ‘what about this palace? I don’t see it.’

  ‘Gondoliere,’ called Lady Henry, ‘Dove il palazzo Labia?’ She waved her hand to the grey buildings and the cloudy skies. Emilio climbed out of the boat.

  ‘See how helpful he is,’ she commented. ‘He knows exactly what I mean.’ Walking, Emilio always looked like an upright torpedo, as though he had been released by a mechanical contrivance and would knock down the first obstacle he met, or explode.

  ‘We were fortunate to get him,’ she continued. ‘We only hold him by a legal fiction; we couldn’t hire him, he has been too popular, poor fellow, all the summer, and no doubt fears the stilettos of his friends. I tried my utmost, Henry, didn’t I, to shake his resolution. I spoke in every tongue, but he was deaf to them all. So we re-engage him at the end of each ride, which does just as well, and salves his troublesome conscience. To-morrow, alas, we must go.’

  They had gone down a passage and reached a door, the sullen solidity of which was impaired by the decay and neglect of centuries. Emilio pulled at the rusty bell and listened.

  ‘Do you think,’ Lavinia said suddenly, ‘you could ask him to be our gondolier, Mamma’s and mine, when you’ve finished with him? Just for two days; we leave on Friday.’

  ‘Why, of course,’ Lady Henry said.

  She conducted the negotiation in her voluble broken Italian, pointed at Lavinia, pointed at herself, overrode some objection, made light of some scruple, and finally, out of the welter of questions and replies, drew forth, all raw as it were and quivering, Emilio’s consent. Over his fierceness he looked a little sheepish, as though the unusual rapidity of his thoughts had outstripped his expression and left it disconnected, drolly representing an earlier mood.

  The door opened and they climbed to the high formal room where Antony and Cleopatra, disembarking, stare at Antony and Cleopatra feasting.

  They had tea at Florian’s, under a stormy sky.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Lady Henry de Winton said, ‘Miss Johnstone ought to be told some of those charming things Caroline said about her? Such a rain of dewdrops,’ she added turning to Lavinia. ‘I think we know you well enough.’

  ‘Perhaps Miss Johnstone doesn’t like hearing the truth about herself,’ Lord Henry suggested.

  ‘Oh, but such a truth—one could only mind not hearing it. First of all there were the general directions. Do you remember, Henry? We were not to shock her.’

  ‘Caroline thought you were very easily shocked,’ said Lord Henry, diffidently.

  ‘She had the Puritan conscience—the only one left in America; she might have stepped out of Mrs. Field’s drawing-room.’

  ‘Really, we must talk to Miss Johnstone, not about her,’ said Lord Henry, and they pulled up their chairs, turning radiant faces to Lavinia.

  ‘And not Puritan, my dear,’ Lord Henry put in. ‘Fastidious, choosy.’

  ‘I accept the amendment. Anyhow you would feel a stain like a wound. Then there were your friends.’

  ‘What about them?’ Lavinia asked.

  ‘Oh, they were a very compact body, but they agreed in nothing except in liking you. Each one had a pedestal for you, and thought the others did not value you enough. And they were very exacting. They had a special standard for you; if you so much as wobbled, the news was written, telephoned and cabled, in fact universally discussed.’

  ‘And universally denied,’ Lord Henry said.

  ‘Of course. But where others might steal a horse, I gathered, you mightn’t look over the hedge.’

  ‘That was only because,’ Lord Henry gently took her up, ‘you never wanted to look over the hedge.’

  ‘Do you recognize yourself in the portrait, Miss Johnstone?’ Lady Henry asked.

  ‘Oh, Caroline!’ Lavinia groaned.

  ‘There’s more to come,’ Lady Henry pursued. ‘You were inwardly simple, outwardly sophisticated. When you talked about your friends you were never malicious and yet never dull. You were a good judge of character; no one could take you in.’

  ‘She said,’ Lord Henry interpolated, with charming solicitude, ‘that no one would want to.’

  But his wife saw a further meaning in this well-meant gloss and repudiated it.

  ‘Nonsense, Henry: anyone would be delighted to take Miss Johnstone in: she must be the target of all bad characters. Caroline was praising her intelligence. There, you shall pay for interrupting me by completing the catalogue of her virtues: a formidable task.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, sure of his ground this time, bending upon Lavinia his bright, soft look: ‘an easy one. Your poise was what your friends most admired. You took the heat out of controversies; you were a rallying point; you made other people feel at their best; you ingeminated peace.’

  ‘How eloquent he is!’ Lady Henry murmured, shaking her head.

  ‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘you were a great responsibility, the only one they had. They would never let you get married; they would rush to the altar and forbid the banns. You were, you were,’ he concluded lamely, ‘their criterion of respectability: they couldn’t afford to lose you.’

  Lavinia got up. Behind her St. Mark’s spread out opalescent in the dusk.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and thank you for this afternoon. I must go, but before I go will you tell me what vices Caroline said I had? I know her,’ she went on, looking down at them without a smile. ‘She must have mentioned some.’

  They looked at each other in dismay.

  ‘Be fair,’ Lavinia said, turning away. ‘Think of the burden I carry, with all those recommendations round my neck.’

  ‘We didn’t mean to “give you a character”,’ Lord Henry’s voice stressed the inverted commas.

  ‘Couldn’t you,’ said Lavinia turning to them again, ‘take just a little bit of it away?’

  Perhaps Lady Henry was stung by her ungraciousness. ‘Caroline did say,’ she pronounced judicially, ‘that she—that they all-wondered whether, perhaps, you weren’t self-deceived: that was what helped you to keep up.’

  ‘Not consciously deceived,’ Lord Henry said, ‘and they didn’t want you undeceived: it was their business to see you weren’t.’

  They both rose. ‘Good-bye,’ said Lady Henry. ‘It’s been delightful meeting you. And may we subscribe to what Caroline said?’

  Lavinia said they might.

  Without much noticing where she went, she made her way over the iron bridge, past the great church of the Gesuati on to the Fondamenta delle Zattere. The causeway was thronged, chiefly it seemed by old women. Hard-faced but beautiful in the Venetian way, they moved through the mysterious twilight, themselves n
ot mysterious at all. Even their loitering was purposeful. The long low crescent of the Giudecca enfolded the purple waters of the canal, shipping closed it on the east; but at the western end there was a gap which the level sun streamed through, a narrow strait, seeming narrower for the bulwark of a factory that defined its left-hand side. The sense of the open sea, so rare in Venice, came home to Lavinia now; she felt the gap to be a wound in the side of the city, a gash in its completeness, a false word in the incantation of its spell. She fixed her eyes on it hopefully. She was conscious of a sort of drift going by her towards the sea, not a movement of the atmosphere, but an effluence of Venice. It was as though the beauty of the town had nourished itself too long and become its own poison; and at this hour the inflammation sighed itself away. Lavinia longed to let something go from her into the drift, something that also was an inflammation of beauty and would surely join its kind. The healing gale plucked at it, caressed it, and disowned it. The sun, pierced by a gigantic post, disappeared into the sea, and at the same moment the black mass of the Bombay liner detached itself from the wharf, moved slowly across the opening and settled there. The canal was sealed from end to end.