The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘Look,’ said another voice. ‘She has the same wound in her neck.’

  ‘That wound I gave the Dragon.’

  ‘And what is this?’ asked a third, pointing to a ball of linen, tightly grasped in Princess Hermione’s outstretched hand. He took it and shook it out: the smell of chloroform filled the air. A cluster of eyes read the name in the corner of the handkerchief: it was Conrad’s.

  ‘And you poisoned her as well!’ they gasped.

  ‘That poison,’ said Conrad, ‘I gave to the Dragon.’

  One or two nodded their heads; but the rest shouted:

  ‘But you must have killed her! How else did she die?’

  Conrad passed his hand across his face.

  ‘Why should I kill her? I love her,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘It was the Dragon I killed.’

  Then, as they all gazed at him fascinated, he added:

  ‘But the Dragon was the Princess!’

  Immediately there was a terrible hubbub, and to shouts of ‘Liar, ‘Murderer,’ ‘Traitor,’ Conrad was hustled from the room and lodged in a neighbouring dungeon. He was released almost immediately and never brought up for trial, though a section of the Press demanded it.

  A story was put about that the Princess had somehow met her death defending Conrad from the Dragon; and Conrad, when asked if this was so, would not altogether deny it. His hour of popularity as slayer of the Dragon soon passed, and in its place he incurred the lasting odium of having been somehow concerned in the Princess’s death. ‘He ought never to have used that chloroform,’ was a criticism repeated with growing indignation from mouth to mouth. ‘No sportsman would have.’ It was a mark of patriotism to make light of the Dragon’s misdeeds, for their long continuance redounded little to the country’s credit and capacity. They were speedily forgotten, while the fame of Princess Hermione, a national treasure, went mounting ever higher in the hearts of her countrymen. Before the year was out, Conrad heard a man in the street say to his friend:

  ‘What does it matter if the Princess did change herself into a dragon? She only did it for a lark.’

  Conrad went back to his home, but he soon received an official intimation that in his own and the common interest, he ought to leave the country. The government would find him a passport and pay his fare. This was all the reward he got for killing the Dragon, but he went gladly enough—the more gladly that Charlotte consented to go with him. She stipulated, however, that they should make their home in a Republic. There they were married and lived happily ever after.

  THE ISLAND

  How well I remembered the summer aspect of Mrs. Santander’s island, and the gratefully deciduous trees among the pines of that countryside coming down to the water’s edge and over it! How their foliage, sloping to a shallow dome, sucked in the sunlight, giving it back all grey and green! The sea, tossing and glancing, refracted the light from a million spumy points; the tawny sand glared, a monochrome unmitigated by shades; and the cliffs, always bare, seemed to have achieved an unparalleled nudity, every speck on their brown flanks clamouring for recognition.

  Now every detail was blurred or lost. In the insufficient, ill-distributed November twilight the island itself was invisible. Forms and outlines survive but indistinctly in the memory; it was hard to believe that the spit of shingle on which I stood was the last bulwark of that huge discursive land-locked harbour, within whose meagre mouth Mrs. Santander’s sea-borne territory seemed to ride at anchor. In the summer I pictured it as some crustacean, swallowed by an ill-turned starfish, but unassimilated. How easy it had been to reach it in Mrs. Santander’s gay plunging motor-boat! And how inaccessible it seemed now, with the motor-boat fallen, as she had written to tell me, into war-time disuse, with a sea running high and so dark that, save for the transparent but scarcely luminous wave-tips, it looked like an agitated solid. The howling of the wind, and the oilskins in which he was encased, made it hard to attract the ferryman’s attention. I shouted to him: ‘Can you take me over to the island?’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ said the ferryman, and pointed to the tumultuous waves in the harbour.

  ‘What are you here for?’ I bawled. ‘I tell you I must get across; I have to go back to France to-morrow.’

  In such circumstances it was impossible to argue without heat. The ferryman turned, relenting a little. He asked querulously in the tone of one who must raise a difficulty at any cost: ‘What if we both get drowned?’

  What a fantastic objection! ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘There’s no sea to speak of; anyhow, I’ll make it worth your while.’

  The ferryman grunted at my unintentional pleasantry. Then, as the landing stage was submerged by the exceptionally high tide, he carried me on his back to the boat, my feet trailing in the water. The man lurched at every step, for I was considerably heavier than he; but at last, waist-deep in water, he reached the boat and turned sideways for me to embark. How uncomfortable the whole business was. Why couldn’t Mrs. Santander spend November in London like other people? Why was I so infatuated as to follow her here on the last night of my leave when I might have been lolling in the stalls of a theatre? The craft was behaving oddly, rolling so much that at every other stroke one of the boatman’s attenuated seafaring oars would be left high and dry. Once, when we happened to be level with each other, I asked him the reason of Mrs. Santander’s seclusion. At the top of his voice he replied: ‘Why, they do say she be lovesick. Look out!’ he added, for we had reached the end of our short passage and were “standing by” in the succession of breakers. But the ferryman misjudged it. Just as the keel touched the steep shingle bank, a wave caught the boat, twisted it round and half over, and I lost my seat and rolled about in the bottom of the boat, getting very wet.

  How dark it was among the trees. Acute physical discomfort had almost made me forget Mrs. Santander. But as I stumbled up the grassy slope I longed to see her.

  She was not in the hall to welcome me. The butler, discreetly noticing my condition, said: ‘We will see about your things, sir.’ I was thankful to take them off, and I flung them about the floor of my bedroom—that huge apartment that would have been square but for the bow-window built on to the end. The wind tore at this window, threatening to drive it in; but not a curtain moved. Soundlessness, I remembered, was characteristic of the house. Indeed, I believe you might have screamed yourself hoarse in that room and not have been heard in the adjoining bathroom. Thither I hastened and wallowed long and luxuriously in the marble bath; deliberately I splashed the water over the side, simply to see it collected and marshalled away down the little grooves that unerringly received it. When I emerged, swathed in hot towels, I found my clothes already dried and pressed. Wonderful household. A feeling of unspeakable well-being descended upon me as, five minutes before dinner-time, I entered the drawing-room. It was empty. What pains Mrs. Santander must be bestowing on her toilette! Was it becoming her chief asset? I wondered. Perish the thought! She had a hundred charms of movement, voice and expression, and yet she defied analysis. She was simply irresistible! How Santander, her impossible husband, could have retired to South America to nurse an injured pride, or as he doubtless called it, an injured honour, passed my comprehension. She had an art to make the most commonplace subject engaging. I remembered having once admired the lighting of the house. I had an odd fancy that it had a quality not found elsewhere, a kind of whiteness, a power of suggesting silence. It helped to give her house its peculiar hush. ‘Yes,’ she had said, ‘and it’s all so simple; the sea makes it, just by going in and out!’ A silly phrase, but her intonation made it linger in the memory like a charm.

  I sat at the piano and played. There were some songs on the music-rest—Wolf, full of strange chords and accidentals so that I couldn’t be sure I was right. But they interested me; and I felt so happy that I failed to notice how the time was drawing on—eight o’clock, and dinner should have been at a quarter to. Growing a little restless, I rose and walked up and down the room. One corner of it was in sha
dow, so I turned on all the lights. I had found it irritating to watch the regular expansion and shrinkage of my shadow. Now I could see everything; but I still felt constrained, sealed up in that admirable room. It was always a shortcoming of mine not to be able to wait patiently. So I wandered into the dining-room and almost thought—such is the power of overstrung anticipation—that I saw Mrs. Santander sitting at the head of the oval table. But it was only an effect of the candlelight. The two places were laid, hers and mine; the glasses with twisty stems were there, such a number of glasses for the two of us! Suddenly I remembered I was smoking and, taking an almond, I left the room to its four candles. I peeped inside the library; it was in darkness, and I realized, as I fumbled for the switch without being able to find it, that I was growing nervous. How ridiculous! Of course, Mrs. Santander wouldn’t be in the library and in the dark. Abandoning the search for the switch, I returned to the drawing-room.

  I vaguely expected to find it altered, and yet I had ceased to expect to see Mrs. Santander appear at any moment. That always happens when one waits for a person who doesn’t come. But there was an alteration—in me. I couldn’t find any satisfaction in struggling with Wolf; the music had lost its hold. So I drew a chair up to the china-cabinet; it had always charmed me with its figures of Chinamen, those white figures, conventional and stiff, but so smooth and luminous and significant. I found myself wondering, as often before, whether the ferocious pleasure in their expressions was really the Oriental artist’s conception of unqualified good humour, or whether they were not, after all, rather cruel people. And this disquieting topic aroused others that I had tried successfully to repress: the exact connotation of my staying in the house as Mrs. Santander’s guest, an unsporting little mouse playing when the cat was so undeniably, so effectually away. To ease myself of these obstinate questionings, I leant forward to open the door of the cabinet, intending to distract myself by taking one of the figures into my hands. Suddenly I heard a sound and looked up. A man was standing in the middle of the room.

  ‘I’m afraid the cabinet’s locked,’ he said.

  In spite of my bewilderment, something in his appearance struck me as odd: he was wearing a hat. It was a grey felt hat, and he had an overcoat that was grey too.

  ‘I hope you don’t take me for a burglar,’ I said, trying to laugh.

  ‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘not that.’ I thought his eyes were smiling, but his mouth was shadowed by a dark moustache. He was a handsome man. Something in his face struck me as familiar; but it was not an unusual type and I might easily have been mistaken.

  In the hurry of getting up I knocked over a set of fire-irons—the cabinet flanked the fireplace—and there was a tremendous clatter. It alarmed and then revived me. But I had a curious feeling of defencelessness as I stooped down to pick the fire-irons up, and it was difficult to fix them into their absurd sockets. The man in grey watched my operations without moving. I began to resent his presence. Presently he moved and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his fingers to the warmth.

  ‘We haven’t been introduced,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘we haven’t.’

  Then, while I was growing troubled and exasperated by his behaviour, he offered an explanation. ‘I’m the engineer Mrs. Santander calls in now and then to superintend her electric plant. That’s how I know my way about. She’s so inventive, and she doesn’t like to take risks.’ He volunteered this. ‘And I came in here in case any of the fittings needed adjustment. I see they don’t.’

  ‘No,’ I said, secretly reassured by the stranger’s account of himself; ‘but I wish—of course, I speak without Mrs. Santander’s authority—I wish you’d have a look at the switches in the library. They’re damned inconvenient.’ I was so pleased with myself for having compassed the expletive that I scarcely noticed how the engineer’s fingers, still avid of warmth, suddenly became rigid.

  ‘Oh, you’ve been in the library, have you?’ he said.

  I replied that I had got no further than the door. ‘But if you can wait,’ I added politely to this superior mechanic who liked to style himself an engineer, ‘Mrs. Santander will be here in a moment.’

  ‘You’re expecting her?’ asked the mechanic.

  ‘I’m staying in the house,’ I replied stiffly. The man was silent for several moments. I noticed the refinement in his face, the good cut of his clothes. I pondered upon the physical disability that made it impossible for him to join the army.

  ‘She makes you comfortable here?’ he asked; and a physical disturbance, sneezing or coughing, I supposed, seized him, for he took out his handkerchief and turned from me with all the instinct of good breeding. But I felt that the question was one his station scarcely entitled him to make, and ignored it. He recovered himself.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘I must be going home. The wind is dropping. By the way,’ he added, ‘we have a connection in London. I think I may say it’s a good firm. If ever you want an electric plant installed!—I left a card somewhere.’ He searched for it vainly. ‘Never mind,’ he said, with his hand on the door, ‘Mrs. Santander will give you all particulars.’ Indulgently I waved my hand, and he was gone.

  A moment later it seemed to me that he wouldn’t be able to cross to the mainland without notifying the ferryman. I rang the bell. The butler appeared. ‘Mrs. Santander is very late, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, momentarily dismissing the question. ‘But there’s a man, a mechanic or something—you probably know.’ The butler looked blank. ‘Anyhow,’ I said, ‘a man has been here attending to the lighting; he wants to go home; would you telephone the boatman to come and fetch him away?’

  When the butler had gone to execute my order, my former discomfort and unease returned. The adventure with the engineer had diverted my thoughts from Mrs. Santander. Why didn’t she come? Perhaps she had fallen asleep, dressing. It happened to women when they were having their hair brushed. Gertrude was imperious and difficult; her maid might be afraid to wake her. Then I remembered her saying in her letter, ‘I shall be an awful fright because I’ve had to give my maid the sack.’ It was funny how the colloquialisms jarred when you saw them in black and white; it was different when she was speaking. Ah, just to hear her voice! Of course, the loss of her maid would hinder her, and account for some delay. Lucky maid, I mused confusedly, to have her hair in your hands! Her image was all before me as I walked aimlessly about the room. Half tranced with the delight of that evocation, I stopped in front of a great bowl, ornamented with dragons, that stood on the piano. Half an hour ago I had studied its interior that depicted terracotta fish with magenta fins swimming among conventional weeds. My glance idly sought the pattern again. It was partially covered by a little slip of paper. Ah! the engineer’s card! His London connection! Amusedly I turned it over to read the fellow’s name.

  ‘Mr. Maurice Santander.’

  I started violently, the more that at the same moment there came a knock at the door. It was only the butler; but I was so bewildered I scarcely recognized him. Too well-trained, perhaps, to appear to notice my distress, he delivered himself almost in a speech. ‘We can’t find any trace of the person you spoke of, sir. The ferryman’s come across and he says there’s no one at the landing-stage.’

  ‘The gentleman,’ I said, ‘has left this,’ and I thrust the card into the butler’s hand.

  ‘Why, that must be Mr. Santander!’ the servant of Mr. Santander’s wife at last brought out.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I think perhaps as it’s getting late, we ought to try and find Mrs. Santander. The dinner will be quite spoiled.’

  Telling the butler to wait and not to alarm the servants, I went alone to Gertrude’s room. From the end of a long passage I saw the door standing partly open; I saw, too, that the room was in darkness. There was nothing strange in that, I told myself; but it would be methodical, it would save time, to examine the intervening rooms first. Examine! What a misleading word. I b
anished it, and ‘search’ came into my mind. I rejected that too. As I explored the shuttered silences I tried to find a formula that would amuse Gertrude, some facetious understatement of my agitated quest. ‘A little tour of inspection’—she would like that. I could almost hear her say: ‘So you expected to find me under a sofa!’ I wouldn’t tell her that I had looked under the sofas, unless to make a joke of it: something about dust left by the housemaid. I rose to my knees, spreading my hands out in the white glow. Not a speck. But wasn’t conversation—conversation with Gertrude—made up of little half-truths, small forays into fiction? With my hand on the door—it was of the last room and led on to the landing—I rehearsed the pleasantry aloud: ‘During the course of a little tour of inspection, Gertrude, I went from one dust-heap to another, from dust unto dust I might almost say. . . .’ This time I must overcome my unaccountable reluctance to enter her room. Screwing up my courage, I stepped into the passage, but for all my resolution I got no further.

  The door still stood as I had first seen it—half open; but there was a light in the room—a rather subdued light, possibly from the standard lamp by the bed. I knocked and called ‘Gertrude!’ and when there was no reply I pushed open the door. It moved from right to left so as not to expose the bulk of the room, which lay on the left side. It seemed a long time before I was fairly in.

  I saw the embers of the fire, the pale troubled lights of the mirror, and, vivid in the pool of light by the bed, a note. It said: ‘Forgive me dearest, I have had to go. I can’t explain why, but we shall meet some time. All my love, G.’ There was no envelope, no direction, but the handwriting was hers and the informality characteristic of her. It was odd that the characters, shaky as they were, did not seem to have been written in haste. I was trying to account for this, trying to stem, by an act of concentration, the tide of disappointment that was sweeping over me, when a sudden metallic whirr sounded in my ear. It was the telephone—the small subsidiary telephone that communicated with the servants’ quarters. ‘It will save their steps,’ she had said, when I urged her to have it put in; and I remembered my pleasure in this evidence of consideration, for my own motives had been founded in convenience and even in prudence. Now I loathed the black shiny thing that buzzed so raucously and never moved. And what could the servants have to say to me except that Mr. Santander had—well, gone. What else was there for him to do? The instrument rang again and I took up the receiver.