The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  The night was very hot. Lavinia walked to the door of the hotel that opened on the canal and leaned against the door-post, looking out. Voices began to reach her; she recognized the tones, but the intonations seemed different.

  ‘She’s like an unlighted candle,’ Lady Henry de Winton was saying. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  ‘An altar-candle?’ suggested her husband. ‘Well, we did our best to light her.’

  ‘No, not an altar-candle,’ Lady Henry said. ‘Not so living as that. A candle by a corpse.’

  Lavinia tried to move away and could not.

  ‘Didn’t you find her a little un-forthcoming,’ Lady Henry went on, half-injured, half-perplexed, ‘and rather remote, as if she had something on her mind? She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself, poor thing. We may have been enjoying ourselves too much, but I don’t think it was that. Did you notice how she scarcely ever followed up what one said?’

  ‘Perhaps she was tired,’ Lord Henry said. ‘She spends a lot of time looking after her mother.’

  Does she? thought Lavinia.

  ‘I could see what Caroline meant,’ Lady Henry continued. ‘The features were there all right, but the face wasn’t. I felt so sorry for her, I longed to save her from her depression or whatever it is; I piled it on; I put words into Caroline’s mouth; I perjured myself; which reminds me, my darling, that you did dot my “i’s” a little too openly.’

  ‘I tried to make what you said seem true,’ Lord Henry remarked.

  ‘Of course you did.’ There was a pause in which they might have kissed each other.

  ‘Let’s forget Miss Johnstone. We’ve done our kind act for to-day.’

  There was a creaking of chairs and Lavinia fled to her room.

  ‘It’s no use,’ she wrote, after several attempts. ‘I cannot say what I think; I do not know what I think. I am intolerably lonely. I am in love with Emilio, I am infatuated by him: that explains me. If I can’t be justified, at any rate I can be explained. Why should I hold out any longer? I am unrecognizable to myself, and to my friends. My past life has no claim on me, it doesn’t stretch out a hand to me. I believed in it, I lived it as carefully as I could and it has betrayed me. If I invoked it now (I do invoke it) it wouldn’t give me any help. Its experience is all fabulous; its sign-posts point to castles in Spain. Whatever happens between me and Emilio I could never find my way back to it. Respectability must lose its criterion.

  ‘It pleased me to know that Emilio had been honest after his fashion. I can’t pretend I admire him or even that I very much like him. The only creditable feeling I have is a sort of glow of the heart when he behaves less badly than I expect. These are the credentials of my passion; credential really, but the word is plural. Passion, I call it, but a shorter word describes it better. It does seem a little hard that now I have gone through so much, given up so much, I have no sense of exaltation, no impulse left. I suppose the effort of clearing the jungle of past associations has taken all my strength. I have made a desert and called it peace.’

  Next morning a letter accompanied Lavinia’s breakfast. She opened it listlessly; she had hardly slept, and all her sensations seemed second-hand.

  ‘No, my dear Lavinia,’ she read, ‘you do not deceive me, though you do surprise me. I hope this letter will find you in America, but if it doesn’t, if you have flouted my commands and are still eating your heart out in Venice, it may still serve a useful purpose. How simple you were to imagine I should be taken in by the apocryphal Miss Perkins! If you hadn’t been in your weak way so catty about her, I might have thought twice about believing in her; but your letters, you know, are always crammed with things like this: “Dear Caroline, what a saint she is, she sent me a thimble at Christmas”.

  ‘I will now give you some rules for your guidance and I earnestly counsel you to follow them. As to your design of shipping the adored to Boston, I don’t like to say what I feel about it; but this I will say: it alarmed me for you. Lavinia, you are not at all cut out for what I might call the guerrilla warfare of love. Your irregularities would be much too irregular.

  ‘Now listen to me, Simonetta Perkins, you who were once recommended to Mrs. Johnstone, then rejected by her, and have now devolved upon yourself. The great thing to do is to have a programme. At ten, say, go and have a straight talk with your mother; tell her to get up, there’s nothing the matter with her, and she’s only wasting her time in bed. At 10.30 go to your bedroom or some inaccessible place, the roof if possible, ring the bell and tell the waiter to bring you a cocktail. Nothing is so successful in restoring one’s self-respect as giving servants a great deal of trouble. At eleven, sit down and write some letters, preferably a testimonial to me saying you are following my instructions and deriving benefit. At twelve you might visit one of the larger churches. I suggest SS. Giovanni e Paolo: don’t look at the church, look at the tourists, and despise them. Order your luncheon with care and see that you get what you like and like what you get. In the afternoon go to the Lido, or else buy yourself some trifle at a curiosity shop (I recommend one in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, kept by a man with a name like a Spanish golfer,——della Torre). At five you should call on a Venetian hostess, submit to universal introduction (they will hate you if you don’t and think you mal élevée), praise the present administration and listen politely to the descendants of the doges. If the flutter in your heart is still unsubdued go to Zampironi’s on the way to your hotel and get some bromide: they have it on tap there. In the evening, if you haven’t been asked to a party, go to Florian’s and drink liqueurs—strega, I suggest. Or, if you want a shorter way to oblivion, their horrible benedictine punch. Repeat the time-table on Thursday, and on Friday, by the time your train reaches Verona, certainly when it reaches Brescia, you will have forgotten your gondolier, his name, his face, everything about him.

  ‘But whatever you do, Lavinia, don’t make your plight fifty times worse by dragging morality into it. I suspect you of examining your conscience, chalking up black marks against yourself, wearing a Scarlet Letter and generally working yourself into a state. Put all such notions from you. The whole thing is a question of convenience. It arises constantly, it is not at all serious. Obviously you can’t marry the man; he is probably married already, and has a large family nearly as old as himself: they marry very young. If you were anyone else you might have him as a lover. I shouldn’t advise it, but with reasonable precautions it could be successfully carried through. But really, Lavinia, for you to have a cavalier servente of that kind would be the greatest folly; you would reproach yourself and feel you had done wrong. And it’s not a question of right and wrong, as I said: only a child of the ‘fifties would think it was. So good-bye Lavinia, and if you can bring me a snapshot of him we will laugh over it together.

  With love,

  Elizabeth Templeman.’

  Lavinia read the letter with relief, with irritation, finally, without emotion of any kind. It was soothing to have her situation made light of; it was irritating to have it made fun of. But in proposing a solution based on reason Miss Templeman had missed the mark altogether, while her appeal to convention added another to Lavinia’s store of terrors. She could face the reproaches of her friends, the intimate disapproval of her conscience; they were part of her ordinary life. But the enmity of convention was outside her experience, for she had always been its ally, marched in its van. She could not placate it because it was implacable; its function was to disapprove.

  The Evanses had gone, Stephen had gone, the Kolynopulos had gone, the de Wintons had gone; Elizabeth had failed to come, and Mrs. Johnstone would not rise till noon. Lavinia was alone.

  Emilio did not desert her; he came in all his finery, he was delighted to see her. Stepping into the gondola Lavinia felt almost satisfied. It was a prize she had fought for against odds during a fortnight, and at last it was hers. ‘Comandi, Signorina?’ Emilio said, slowly moving his oar backwards and forwards. ‘Am I his Anthea?’ thought Lavinia. ‘Can I command him an
ything?’ But she only suggested they should go to San Salvatore. ‘Chiesa molto bella,’ she hazarded. ‘Si, si,’ returned Emilio, ‘e molto antica.’ That was the sort of conversation she liked, so easy, like fitting together two halves of a proverb. She felt deliriously weary. Suddenly she heard a shout. Emilio answered it, more loquaciously than was his wont. She looked up: it was only a passing gondolier, saying good-morning. Another shout. This time a whole sentence followed, in those clipped syllables which Lavinia could never catch. Emilio ceased rowing and answered at length, speaking in short bursts and with great conviction. A minute later a similar, even longer, interchange took place. The whole army of gondoliers seemed to take an interest in Emilio, to know his business and to be congratulating him on some success. Suddenly it seemed to Lavinia that from every pavement, traghetto, doorstep, and window a fire of enquiries was being directed upon her gondolier; and the enquirers all looked at her.

  ‘It’s my imagination,’ she thought; but in the afternoon the same thing happened again; it was like a nightmare. Convention, even Venetian convention, was showing its teeth, growling through the walls of its glass house. Lavinia was seized with a contempt for all these people, mopping and mowing and poking their noses into other people’s business. ‘What are they,’ she thought, ‘this population of Lascars and Dagoes?’ For a moment she felt Emilio to belong to them, a rift opened between her and him: she saw him as it were through the wrong end of a telescope, minute, insignificant, menial, not worth a thought. In his place appeared all the generations of the Johnstones, sincere, simple, grave from the performance of municipal and even higher functions, servants of their own time, benefactors of the time to come.

  They were the people upon whom America had depended; America owed everything to them. From the sixteen-thirties when they arrived until the beginnings of vulgarization in the eighteen-eighties, for two hundred and fifty years they had persisted, an aristocracy unconscious of its own aristocratic principle, homely, solid, and affluent. If they remembered their descent—and Lavinia could recollect every generation of hers—they remembered it historically, not personally: the matter of genealogy was common knowledge: it was a bond to hold them together, not a standard for others to fall short of. It was domestic, this society to which they belonged, it was respectable, it was as democratic as an aristocracy could well be. And still, though threatened on all sides by an undifferentiated plutocracy, it kept its character, it preserved its primness, its scrupulosity, its air of something home-made and old-fashioned, without gloss or glitter. The lives of rich people now-a-days tended to follow the line of least resistance. They could go where they wanted, see what they wanted, do what they wanted; but the range of their desires was miserably contracted; with them personality was a mere drop in the bucket of prosperity. If they possessed a Gainsborough, they only possessed a name. ‘But if we have a Gainsborough,’ Lavinia mused, ‘we are not thereby debarred cherishing the lines of the family tea-pot; and it would hurt me more to lose my grandmother’s brooch than my pearl necklace.’ ‘That is it,’ she continued, elated, feeling herself necessary to civilization: ‘we have not lost touch with small things although we have had experience of great affairs; we can still discriminate, we still have an intimacy that does not need to wear its heart upon its sleeve or barter its secrets in the open market.’ Higher and higher mounted the tide of her self-complacency. For days the mood had been a stranger to her; now she encouraged it, indulged it, exulted in it, thinking, in her buoyancy, it would never leave her.

  ‘We didn’t take things lightly,’ she boasted, ‘we made life hard for ourselves. We thought that prosperity followed a good conscience, not, as they think now, that a good conscience follows prosperity. We did not find an excuse for wickedness in high places.’ Unaccountably the rhythm of her thought faltered; it had felt itself free of the heavens, but it was singed, and drooped earthward with damaged wing. ‘If Hester Prynne had lived in Venice,’ she thought, ‘she needn’t have stood in the pillory.’ For a moment she wished that Hawthorne’s heroine could have found a country more congenial to her temperament. It was my ancestors who punished her,’ she thought. ‘They had to: they had to stick at something. One must mind something, or else the savour goes out of life, and it stinks.’ She glanced uneasily round the room. It had taken back its friendship and had an air of lying in wait for her to disgrace herself. ‘Take that,’ she muttered, slamming the wardrobe door. But it swung back at her, as though something inside wanted to have a look. ‘All right,’ she threatened, ‘gim-crack stuff in a paste-board palazzo. At home, if I shut a door, it shuts.’ But the brave words didn’t convince her, and when she tried to visualize her home, she couldn’t. The breakdown in her imaginative faculty alarmed her. Suppose that, for the remainder of her life, when she wanted to evoke an image, it wouldn’t come? Tentatively, not committing herself to too great an effort, she trained her mind’s eye upon the portrait of her great-aunt, Sophia. There was a blur, then a blank: and in turn, as she called upon them, each of the portraits evaded her summons. ‘It is unkind of you,’ she murmured, almost in tears, ‘after I have given you all such a good character.’ Then suddenly, as her mind relaxed, the images she had striven for flooded uncontrollably into it, bending their disapproving stare upon her, proclaiming their hostility.

  Who was she to commend them? Small thanks would they have given her for her praise: they could only relish a compliment if it came from a virtuous person. They wouldn’t want her even to agree with them: they would distrust their very thoughts if she said she shared them. In whom, then, could she confide and to whom could she go for help? Not to the dead and gone Johnstones, for by no act of renunciation could she ingratiate herself with them. She could plume herself with their prestige if she liked; they could not stop her making a snob of herself. But any closer identification, any claim on their long-preserved integrity, any assumption that she, for what she should now give up, was entitled to take her place beside them—this, their grave displeased faces, still circling about her, positively forbade. She might trade on their name, but their goodwill, the vitality of their tradition, could never be hers. They disowned her.

  ‘Well, let them go,’ thought Lavinia. ‘In the face of life, what use is a recipe from the past? I have fed myself too long upon illusions to want to add another to them.’ She was aware of the grapes going sour; in her mouth was a bitter, salty taste; in her eyes the vision of her fate, limitless, agoraphobic, its last barricade thrown down; in her ears, perhaps, defunctive music, the leave-taking of the gods she loved.

  The glory of the Johnstones seemed to crumble; root, branch, and stem they were stricken and the virtue passed out of them. She walked up and down the room, conscious of an amazing exhilaration. The rivers of her being, long forced uphill, turned back upon themselves, joined and flowed away unhindered in one dark current. At last she had reached a state of mind that did not need working for, that could be maintained without effort, that absorbed her and left nothing over. The sense of being at odds with herself disappeared; the general awareness of friction and unease that had subtly cramped her movements as well as her thought slid from her; her very skin lay more lightly on her.

  ‘I am lost!’ Lavinia cried. It was a moment of ecstasy, but it passed and she burst into tears.

  ‘Well, I don’t want you to go, but you must be back by eleven. Remember we’ve got to get up early.’ Lavinia heard her mother’s voice, the firm voice of the recovered Mrs. Johnstone, but it sounded a long way off. She closed her bedroom door and locked it.

  ‘ “Amo” is all right,’ she muttered, fluttering the leaves of a dictionary, ‘though it has a smack of the Latin Grammar, but should I say “io” too? “Io” is emphatic, it might be taken to mean that I love him but other people don’t; “io ti amo”: “I love you to the exclusion of”—and that would offend him and be silly besides: everyone must love him. “Ti amo, ti amo”, I must remember that.’ Lavinia breathed quickly and lay down for a moment on her bed.
She rose, restless, and looked at the place where she had lain. There was a small depression, scarcely noticeable, and the pillow had filled out again. ‘I make very little mark,’ she said to herself, and the thought, absurdly enough, filled her with self-pity. She went to the looking-glass and stared at her face as though she would never see it again. ‘I ought to have had a photograph taken,’ she thought inconsequently. ‘I could have done: I had time.’ Still standing in front of the mirror she opened her purse; it was empty. Quickly she went to a box, fidgeted with the key and walked slowly back, a bunch of notes in her hand. One by one she stuffed them in her purse. ‘Another?’ she muttered and looking up, met her questioning eyes in the glass. She shuddered and walked unsteadily into a corner of the room behind the wardrobe, as though it were not enough to keep out of her own sight. To the intruder she unconsciously feared, she would have presented the appearance of a naughty child, taking its punishment. ‘One more?’ she muttered, in her new, stifled voice. ‘How can I tell?’