The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘ “What am I here for?” she would ask, plaintively, if one stared out of the window. But she was also proud of them, and if one didn’t look, and kept one’s eyes in the boat, so to speak, she would grow restive and say: “You’ve not looked at the garden. But then you’re not interested in gardens.” One never quite knew where one was with her.

  ‘How invulnerable she was, or seemed to be! And as one sat, listening to her unpredictable malice, which always had the note of collusion in it, one was almost aware of the subject’s accessories strewn about the floor, as in a picture by Velasquez: the shield, the breastplate, the gauntlets—all the apparatus of defence. And as one by one the idols were thrown down, by hints at this or that little weakness, laughable and belittling, so, piece by piece, one put on the whole armour—not of righteousness, for Lady Porteous was too mundane to clothe herself in that—but of ridicule, which in some circumstances is a defence hardly less strong. I always left her feeling twice the man I was, for she had established the fallibility of mankind on such a firm foundation that with her one could laugh at anything, even at death itself. Indeed, I remember once writing an imaginary dialogue in which Death called at Lady Porteous’s palazzo and was told he could not be received as he lacked the necessary social qualifications—he was in fact too common. So, snubbed, he turned away, leaving her immortal. I used to wonder whether I could show her this, for in certain moods she enjoyed a joke against herself, though she preferred that she should tell it.

  ‘But I found that in my absence he had called, and had not been turned away; indeed, he had called twice and of the two it was the frail Sir Hilary who had put up the stiffer fight. The joke had been turned against Lady Porteous at last.

  ‘And it had been turned against me, for I had boasted, not quite truthfully, that she was always at home to me. Perhaps her spirit enjoyed the joke, for she never liked one to call without having rung up first. “I might be out if you didn’t ring up,” she threatened. But Death hadn’t been civil enough to make an appointment with her: she died of a stroke, I was told.

  ‘I left the palace to its alien occupants,’ my friend said, ‘and got home somehow, feeling half the man I was. I hadn’t counted on the weakening effect of my illness, and the long walk, punctuated by disappointments, was too much for me. I seemed to see “No Admittance” written on every door I passed. Closed doors, closed shutters, iron grilles, cats grimacing at me from behind the grilles: Venice on a wet day is barred like a fortress. I took to my bed again and was too much discouraged to write to my other friends who, in any case, didn’t conjure up the real meaning of the word. But the expedition had created in me a hunger which I couldn’t assuage. The idea of death haunted me as it sometimes does in Venice: the churches, the bells, the beauty, the overwhelming vitality of the people: all this insistence on what the senses can give one, on life: if one cannot accept it, what remains but its opposite, death? In Northern countries there are so many degrees of living: one can turn life down, like a gas-fire, and live by its dull glow: but Italy is a land of contrasts, not of half-tones. I felt that time was pressing and I had a legacy to give someone: myself.

  ‘For my second convalescence I returned to my first window and when I looked out it wasn’t in the spirit of a railway passenger, finding something in everything, pleased with just seeing: I had a particular object in view. Only the object was not in view. The palace had twenty-seven windows visible from my flat: it was not exactly opposite, it stood at a slight angle and the windows on the nearer side of the deep courtyard were hidden from me. Those I could see, and from which I could be seen, were of many shapes and sizes, some as tall as a modest-sized house, some squat and longitudinal. I scanned them all, and from time to time I would get up and lean out of my window and wave; and then, dazzled by the glare outside, turn back blinking into what seemed the darkness of my own room. But there was never an answering gesture.

  ‘My month in Venice was running out and I had nothing to show for it. I had scarcely written a word. I had been ill and got better, I had been ill and got better, and I had made one expedition into Venice; otherwise my existence had been as pointless and unfruitful as the Lady of Shalott’s, and far less decorative: you could not have made a poem out of it, you could not have made anything. All I had to show was the money I had ear-marked for Antonio’s wages. On this I could live beyond the time-limit I had prescribed for myself. It was the fruit—the very tangible fruit—of my quarrel with Antonio, and as such had a bitter taste. A sense of utter futility and failure possessed me. It was both personal and moral. Moral for the feeling of time wasted that haunts every unproductive artist: that I was used to. And personally I was a failure: I hadn’t made any contacts. I was used to that, too. But I was not so used to the idea of having let myself down by letting someone else down. La signorina sconosciuta who had found my appearance so interesting and who was so sure that I was interested in her: yielding to a small, spiteful impulse, I had snubbed her, I had rebuffed her, I had taken the line that my privacy was sacrosanct, I had behaved as if a chorus of admirers was egging me on.

  ‘I had treated her as a nuisance, not as a human being, with feelings to be wounded or consoled.

  ‘How brutal I had been, in my self-sufficiency, brushing her aside! Just because, in my life, a certain good fortune had attended me, I felt I could afford to treat her letter as an un-welcome item in a fan-mail.

  ‘How good it was of her, I now thought, to single me out for her attention, how good of her to stay in Venice and wait for me, instead of going away, as Denys and Miranda had, or dying, as Lady Porteous had! In all this great city of Venice, which I had once known so well, she was the only human being left who seemed to care for me, and she was a stranger! She possessed the precious, the sacred gift of sympathy! She had pretended to know something about me, but what could she know? The truth was she had felt the impulse to communicate, and she had acted on it, at whatever cost to pride.

  ‘My visits to the window grew so frequent that in the end I had to ration them to one per quarter of an hour; but I made up for this self-denying ordinance by waving so frantically when I did go that passers-by might well have thought me mad.

  ‘Several days went by like this, and then the second letter came. Shall I read it to you?’ my friend asked. ‘No, you won’t want to hear it, and in any case it’s unpardonable, undressing myself like this in front of you, and undressing——No, it isn’t decent. You should have stopped me long ago. I can’t think why you let me go on.’

  He was quite ready to be angry with me.

  ‘Yes, please read it,’ I said.

  He took out his pocket-book but didn’t open it.

  ‘I could just give you the gist of it,’ he said, eyeing me doubtfully.

  ‘No, let me hear it.’

  He cleared his throat and read rather loudly, in a voice that was quite unlike his own:

  ‘ “Carissimo,—At first I thought that you were angry with me, for what I had written, and then I saw your signals, and knew that you were not. But now you will be really angry for I must say no, no, no. I should never have written to you—it was madness. What possessed me I cannot think: it was something plus fort que moi. I have regretted it ever since: I have shed the bitterest tears. Do not think about me, do not ask about me, above all do not try to find me. But no, think about me a little, as someone who wishes you well but must be forever unknown to you.” ’

  Without looking at me my friend replaced the letter in his note-case and the note-case in his pocket; and for a moment hardly seemed to know where he was. He made one or two false starts and then said, ‘I asked Giuseppina who had brought the letter. She said she did not know; she had found it in the letter-box. She managed to suggest I had reproached her, both with knowing and not knowing; she was a past-master of reproach.

  ‘ “But can’t you think of anybody?” I said stupidly.

  ‘ “But signore, there are so many people in Venice!”

  ‘I got into an odd
state of mind,’ my friend went on. ‘I didn’t lean out of the window any more: I didn’t even look out: if an atom bomb had fallen into the canal I shouldn’t have noticed. My sole occupation was trying to imagine who my correspondent could be, and why she had behaved as she had. That she was beautiful I took for granted: I never doubted it for a moment. Her beauty grew on me with every hour. She was blonde, sumptuous, voluptuous, Venetian, a Veronese figure. And why had she said we must not meet? My mind gave me a dozen answers to that question. She was of too high degree, she was of too low degree, she was ashamed of having made her feelings known to a stranger. For a time—for a few hours—for a few minutes—some one solution would satisfy me; then its plausibility would evaporate, and I would discard it and adopt another.

  ‘Need I say that I had fallen in love with her? Perhaps I must, for you know me well enough to know that I had never been in love with anyone before. How different friendship is—a matter of adjustments, of balancing this with that, of alternating self-assertion and self-sacrifice—but all conducted under the rules—the more or less reasonable rules—of affection. Friendship fits into one’s conception of life; with me, before the war, it was my conception of life—it was the pattern of my picture. It had no rivals: I did not care about money, or position, or even present or posthumous fame, so long as I could feel about me the fabric of friendship protecting me equally against the heat and cold of life, its dangers, boredoms, even its sorrows, protecting me, some people would say—I suppose you would say—against life itself.

  ‘Whereas love! Do you think life can contain love, Arthur? Come to terms with it, I mean? I don’t, I think the two are deadly enemies. But I needn’t tell you, no doubt you know better than I do, what love does. I don’t mean love that has declined into friendship,’ he went on scornfully, ‘but the love that is a virus, a fever, an attack. Love keeps out friendship; it is a parasite, and drains life of its juices. Love keeps out friendship, or if friendship is there first, it ousts it like a cuckoo; how often has one seen it happen! And friendship, with any luck, keeps out love. But I was friendless, I had renounced friendship; and then, when I would have taken it back, friendship had renounced me. My heart was swept and garnished, and destitute of defenders: that was how love got in.

  ‘But I didn’t feel that way at the time. I don’t mean that I didn’t feel tormented, for I did. But the torment was part of the growing together, the fusion of all my faculties which I had so carefully kept separate, to meet, as far as I could, the diverse demands of life. Only so, I thought, could old age be made tolerable—by cultivating one’s responses to the variety of life. Since the war I had neglected this exercise; I had felt the arteries of my mind harden, and been glad of it. For what was the use of trying to keep oneself up to a certain level of—what shall I say? general civilization, when the very people who were most vociferous in defending it were the first to abandon it—had to be, for, if not actually fighting, on them fell all the most decivilizing jobs—of waiting with empty minds and hands for something to happen, or of giving themselves up to some routine employment which an office-boy could have done as well. And feeding their minds with news—news, a quick mental pick-me-up, but how much food is there in it, I ask you, how many vitamins?

  ‘Well, I see you disagree with me but I don’t mind, not as I should have minded then. Then it was the only thing I minded, being disagreed with: and the less there was of me, the further I could contract into myself, the less there was to feel the pains of disagreement. I didn’t feel much, I thought I had ceased to feel at all.

  ‘But I hadn’t, and feeling being new to me I felt much more. My feelings were blissful, for I believed my love to be returned; I never doubted that, indeed my love sprang out of it. And never, even when I was most tormented by the thought that it was all no use, that nothing could come of it, that it was like a cheque for a fortune that lacked the drawer’s signature, I never felt any bitterness, none. Remorse and regret in plenty: for I told myself a hundred times a day that if only I had responded to her overture in the first place—before this dreadful second thought had taken hold of her mind—then all would have been well. We should have been together, we should have been whatever she wanted us to be; and—and my life would have had a meaning and a value that I never dreamed of for it. The belief that this meaning and this value were within my grasp gave me an exultation even while the thought of losing them tormented me. It didn’t make me resentful that, like other lovers before me, I was plagued by the question of ways and means. The difficulty was like a challenge to me. Now that I knew my signals from the window would not be answered, I tried to think of other methods of getting in touch with her. It didn’t occur to me, I’m afraid, to respect her prohibition: in fact the prohibition made me all the more eager: I assumed it was unreasonable, I regarded it simply as one more obstacle to be overcome.

  ‘I could not expect any more help from the windows; they were blind eyes that did not see, or if they saw I could not read their expression. For my purposes the many-windowed façade of the palace, ranged around its deep, dividing chasm, might have been a blank wall, and as at a blank wall I looked at it, when I did look at it.

  ‘I was up against a blank wall: how could I penetrate it? Suddenly it occurred to me, and I cursed myself for not thinking of it before, that the palace had a door as well as windows, a door through which, at one time or another, each of its occupants must go in and out. The door must be on the other side; it must open on the Zattere.

  ‘I can never remember how well you know Venice, Arthur, but the Zattere is a mile-long promenade, with bridges and cafés and all the rest of it, that stretches from the Dogana to the south-west corner of Venice. It faces a great curved sheet of water as wide as the Thames at London Bridge. It gets all the sun there is, and all the moon there is, and all the air there is, and is thronged with people at all hours of the day and most hours of the night. Besides those who are going somewhere on business, there are always crowds of loungers, the licensed loiterers of all Italian towns: and these I joined. I took my stand opposite the great door, and when I was tired of standing there were stone benches to sit on, and round bollards, sturdy mushrooms of stone polished to a honey-coloured smoothness, which were not so comfortable, being convex, but had the advantage that on them one could swivel round in any direction. There I sat, sometimes literally for hours, watching the door as, at very irregular intervals, it opened and shut. Of those who came out I got a full front view; how unaware they seemed of being watched! Those who went in I could not see so well, because, having rung, they turned their backs on me and waited for the electric latch to buzz (I could sometimes hear it) and set the door ajar; then they pushed it and went in. But these I had longer to study, I could learn something of them by the way they waited, impatiently or patiently. And sometimes, as a change from sitting or standing, I would go up to the door myself, casually, as though struck by a sudden whim, and when someone opened it I would peep inside at the immense, murky entrata, with its cross-beams, its marbled stucco flaking from the walls, its solemn doorways crowned by architraves, and, far in the distance, the glimmer of light through the iron grille that opened on the garden and the fountain. To the right was the archway of the great staircase, the main artery of the palace; people went up it and came down it, and I marvelled at their unconcern.

  ‘Sometimes the portinaia—the door-keeper—from her eyrie on the left, or her husband, or one of her children, would challenge the entrant, who would then answer something I could not catch: these, I supposed, were strangers to her. Those who went in without having their business asked were the habitués, the tenants, and these I gradually got to know.

  ‘And also I got to know that none of them was she; for her I should have recognized instantly, I had as little doubt of that as I had that she would recognize me. And when she recognizes me she will not be able to help betraying it, I thought.

  ‘Hope was so buoyant in me that for several days my failure to find the object of
my search only made me more hopeful; I felt, illogically, that the odds against me were being exhausted, and it was a mathematical certainty that I should be successful. Only patience was needed, and I was unconscious of the need, for hope has no need of patience. But gradually it was borne in on me that the sands were running out, my days in Venice were numbered, and I might have to leave without accomplishing what I had come to think of as the aim and object not only of my visit but of my life.