The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘So you did it after all,’ said he.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, pulled them——trousers of yours off my legs,’ he explicitly replied, adding, with a preposterous straining after cultured pronunciation, ‘ ’Orace, I shall require my shaving water early to-morrow!’

  That, then, was his suppressed condition—and I had complied with it.

  WITHELING END

  ‘For Witheling End?’ asked my porter, his hand hovering over the glue-pot.

  It is no longer to the people that one must go for traditional vulgarities of pronunciation. ‘Willing End,’ I commented. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘This line is run for the convenience of intending passengers and boneafied travellers,’ remarked the porter, friendly but ironical. ‘Think it over. You’re not obliged. You needn’t go if you don’t want.’

  Under the fierce assault of his brush the captive, peace-loving glue almost foamed in its agony.

  ‘Ah,’ I sighed, ‘you don’t know.’

  Nor for that matter, I thought, as the train drew out of the dusky station, did I. Not yet. Logically, of course, it made no difference whether I stayed or went. It was the fact of the invitation that counted; the fact of its having, so menacingly, so—there was no burking it—disastrously come to hand. Just a week ago Oswald Clayton had been one of my most cherished friends. And now what was he? An enemy? Well, scarcely anything so personal as that. The others hadn’t, as their turns came, regarded him as an enemy. On the contrary, they had no dealings with him, they hardly ever mentioned him. They acquiesced in, they almost connived at, their own ostracism. And one and all, when pressed to give an account of what had passed, they refused—betrayed uneasiness and turned the question off. Or they would hide their hurt behind a show of pride. ‘Of course, a man with so many friends—he must grow tired of them.’ And secure in Oswald’s friendship one had considered, critically, the smarting cast-off, unattractive like all men with a grievance, and thought ‘Oswald knows his own business best.’

  It was odd that he should have chosen this particular method of conveying to his friends that their affection had become otiose. In other people’s houses, in one’s own house, he might be met without the slightest risk. Risk! With pleasure always, that rare pleasure that his off-handedness, his plain-speaking, his genius for being amused at one’s expense, never failed to give. With his capacity for enjoyment (call it selfishness, now perhaps) he kindled the host in one as nobody else could. In fact the great privilege he conferred was the privilege of waiting on him hand and foot. He awoke in his friends a quite ravenous desire to please; not a repressive, conscientious self-effacement, but an active response to his needs, captious and exacting as they often were. His needs weren’t material, he wasn’t a common cadger, but he couldn’t escape (I searched for a harsh term) the charge of being an emotional adventurer. Given leave, he would open up for one new fields of consciousness; he was the self-appointed prospector, he held the concession. But it was you who worked the field, did the digging and turned up the lumps of ore. His feeling for a relationship, his view of it to himself, happily stopped short of, didn’t include the crucial fact that it was he who made the wheels go round. He thought or pretended to think, in any encounter, that he had stumbled across a little hive of happiness which had buzzed as gaily before he came as it would after he went away. In reality, both before and after, in as far as it buzzed at all, it buzzed to a very different tune. But while he was there, perching and flitting and settling in his agreeable way, his ingenuousness, his irresponsibility carried all before them. He affected to be amazed at the worldly wisdom of his friends; he declared that they were so many serpents, masquerading as doves, and threw himself on the mercy which they unstintingly provided. He only asked to be excused, permitted, taken care of.

  Rather mournfully I made out for myself this inventory of his qualities, for, first-hand at any rate, I was to know them no more. It was to be for me his obituary notice, and I flattered myself that in this sad task I had shown both charity and discrimination; it would be the balsam of his memory, the entelecheia and soul of his subsistence. For I was certainly discarded. Of the half dozen or so who had spent those fatal week-ends at Witheling End, none had survived, none had told the tale. It had become a commonplace among us, the significance of an invitation to Oswald’s home. It was a death warrant, and its probable incidence was the subject of jokes and even bets among the almost decimated battalion of his friends. And now the blow had fallen upon me.

  What, after all, I asked myself while the train thundered remorselessly on, could Oswald do to enforce an estrangement? For it was to be an estrangement on both sides. Otherwise my predecessors in exile, granted that they were committed to keeping up appearances, must have made some slips. News would have leaked through of overtures, tentative essays in reconciliation that Oswald had sternly repelled. And they were not men to take a slight lying down. If they hadn’t been proud before, the distinction of Oswald’s friendship had lent them pride, and the inflation was theirs to keep. Oswald’s tardy application of the pin would only have induced a new inflammation, flushed with anger against him and discharging venom. His creatures would have rounded upon him with all the weight of their derived, threatened importances. But—it came back to me again—they had done nothing of the kind. They had been content to watch their power, their glory pass without lifting a finger. They hadn’t even permitted themselves the exquisite revenge, such was their pious resignation, of turning the other cheek. They seemed to have taken counsel of Desdemona’s meekness; they approved of Oswald’s scorn, they wouldn’t hear of having him blamed.

  Well, I was not so easily to be set aside. If Oswald meant to jettison me, he should have his work cut out. What, I wondered, would be his line of action? And when I considered the almost unlimited power to bore, embarrass and terrify which any host has at his command, I quailed. But, in justice to Oswald, I had to admit that his arsenal wouldn’t be stocked with ordinary instruments of torture. He wouldn’t spring upon me, my first evening, an obligatory charade which I should have to attend in some improvised costume—as a tinker perhaps, tricked out in domestic utensils, hung with saucepans, scoured, polished and sound beyond hope of dint or flaw. It was unlikely that I should be called upon to conceal my identity or exhibit a false one, with the implication that I was only tolerable in the likeness of somebody else. But there were other disguises, I pondered, less palpable and at first blush less disconcerting; but not less obligatory and far more exacting. False impressions, for instance. Oswald wouldn’t launch me as a renowned arctic explorer, but he might convey, by a mere inflection of the voice, that I was something other than I really was, something I might love or loathe to be, it made no difference. I should be committed. Or he might put me to a severer test—the crucible of the haunted room. The reticence shown by his friends, indeed, argued some exposure of this kind. Coaxed, beguiled, flattered, browbeaten, perhaps bribed, they had undergone an experience which, for its very horror, they must for ever keep to themselves. And it needn’t be a horror, I thought, that disclosed itself locally, that was charted, so to speak, and set and timed. That was the snare that was laid vainly in the sight of any bird. But supposing it was something strange in the character of my host, some baseness of fibre, some odious moral lapse or relaxation which he awaited in seclusion and the secret of which he imparted to his friends? Suppose my arrival were to chime with a (to him) calculable outbreak in some awful periodicity, whose convenient punctual eruptions he had cynically harnessed to his own ends—the incineration of spare acquaintances? Picking my way and holding my nose against the unsavoury conditions of my inquiry, I went a step farther. Lycanthropy lifted its head. Oswald might break the thread of conversation by becoming a wolf, furry on the outside, or, more horribly and incurably (for the malady had two forms) furry on the inside. Before such an object the most established affection might pardonably falter. By the time I reached the main-line station which boas
ted, as the least of its importances, that of being the junction for Witheling End, I had given up expecting to find in Oswald even the scarred outline of a human trait. He loomed before me the hero of some Near Eastern legend—marauding, predatory, fatal.

  But the necessity to alight and pace the platform, to stand sentinel, unchallenged and ignored, by the luggage van, to stow away my things in the dirty branch-line carriage, to go through the routine, the mill, one might say, of ‘changing’, this prosaic occupation brought my thoughts to earth. Sadness succeeded terror. Of course, Oswald wouldn’t need to call upon the resources of demonology for my eviction; he could dismiss me without that, as he had dismissed the others. If anyone practised black magic it would be I the following Monday, the day after to-morrow, the first day of my registered recognized exile. I might be excused if, to beguile my disconsolate homecoming, I stuck imaginary pins into his wasting receding image. However flattering the portent to my self-esteem, I needn’t fear that merely out of sympathy with my eclipse the sun would turn into darkness, and the moon into blood. It wouldn’t be necessary to mount me on a horse to reveal my poverty in deportment to the gaping ‘county’. I could display unorthodoxy without being exposed by an archbishop; self-consciousness without the stimulus of a game of forfeits. What shortcoming was there, what social inadequacy or private self-sufficiency, I thought, with melancholy candour, that I couldn’t show, and that without the least external help—without malicious arrangements of background, or predicaments contrived for my downfall? I had no aptitude for ‘social surf-riding’. Oswald’s victory over me, if it consisted in a demonstration of my unfitness and unworthiness, needn’t be costly, needn’t be in the least Pyrrhic. I was shy-flowering, not all hardy or perennial; a hot-house plant, I told myself, with a flamboyant impulse, that would thrive only in a tepid air. It would be enough to turn off the heat and shut out the sun. And that would be his line. A perfunctory welcome would be followed by an evening’s bridge—that game which, however listlessly played, throws over everyone the chill of its formality or brings out the surly side. Then, next morning, a dyspeptic and disorderly application to the Sunday papers, the interchange of spare sheets over a strewn untidy floor, the interchange too, of promiscuous tit-bits, scandalous items, in lieu of conversation. Then the bleak three-quarters of an hour before luncheon. . . . Why, that was the very entertainment I had given Oswald himself at our last meeting. I had been too preoccupied to let his careless good spirits have their way with me. Well, he would get his own back. And what plea could I urge, what declaration could I make to compound for my bad manners? There was nothing left me but my determination, under however many affronts and provocations, never on my side to let go, but be torn, protesting faithfulness, from the very horns of Friendship’s altar.

  An hour later there came a tap on my bedroom door. It was Oswald again. He peeped in furtively, as though fearful of committing a trespass on my absolute occupation.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Changing for dinner. I was afraid you might think it silly and pretentious when we’re just to ourselves.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I expected to. Look at all my finery. It would have broken my heart not to wear it.’

  Still as if on sufferance, he sidled appreciably farther into the warm, light, admirably appointed room.

  ‘Oh, so he has put them out for you. Then that’s all right. And it suits you, dining at eight?’

  That had been the object of his first visit, to obtain my sanction for the hour of dinner.

  ‘Eight o’clock is quite my favourite time,’ I assured him.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and discreetly withdrew.

  Ever since he had greeted me on the steps of that solid red-brick house, voluble explaining and regretting his failure to meet me at the station, he had been—he had ‘gone on’, I felt inclined to say—like that. Apologetic, conciliatory, concerned, he had raised point after point, problem after problem, neglect of which, he seemed to think, would jeopardize my happiness. And though I had tried to meet his misgivings half-way with contra-assertions and confirmations, I couldn’t convince him that I was satisfied, that I had made up my mind, as it were, to stay. He seemed to think that at the smallest domestic rub or breakdown, failure of the bell to ring or of the bath water to boil, I should stalk out of the house. The utmost he seemed to expect of me, his guest, was that I should consent to remain, that, like a captious newly-engaged servant, I should waive my prerogative of impermanence and ‘settle’.

  At first I was flattered. It hardly seemed necessary to congratulate myself on my success, it had come so easily. I even planned, in the interval before dinner, to write to my unluckier friends and tell them how deeply I had struck my roots. They, no doubt, had had to clean their own boots and wash at the pump in the stable-yard; whereas I was met at every turn by gratifying traces of the slaughter of the fatted calf. For them Oswald had been at his most casual—indifferent, irresponsible, careless of their creature comforts. For me, how different. In compliment to me he had put off his ordinary manner, the genial feckleness that sat on him so light, and assumed the air of an anxious housewife bristling (so far as his sobered attenuated demeanour allowed him to bristle) with petits soins. They were even embarrassing, these attentions, in their insistence, in their hydra-like quality of springing up double where one had been scotched. And so I went on, multiplying the instances, deepening the contrast, until the sound of a bell, hastily smothered like a rising indiscretion, invited me to dinner.

  It was to be the keynote of my visit, I reflected, as I lay in bed—invitation. The bell had invited me to dinner; Oswald’s man had invited me to take wine. Oswald himself in his first remarks, delivered ever so courteously across the oval table, had the air of inviting reply. He began:

  ‘Perhaps you’ve never been in this part of the world before?’

  I was encouraged to say ‘No.’

  After a moment’s reflection in which, I supposed, he was passing the countryside in review, he said:

  ‘There’s Clum Abbey near by; would you care to see it?’ I hesitated, not wholly from lukewarmness but because I was at a loss how to frame my answer, how to appear politely eager. He misinterpreted my silence. ‘Don’t feel obliged,’ he said; ‘only I generally take people there.’

  Was this a threat? I longed to say, ‘Take me anywhere else.’ To my lively apprehensions the innocent ruin took on the hues and horrors of a Blue Chamber. But I complied; I succumbed to Clum.

  Other invitations had followed: to smoke, to inspect the house, to play picquet, to take the younger hand first, to name the stakes.

  ‘Give me some indication,’ I said, wishing that he hadn’t, after the insinuating fashion of the odd-job man, ‘left it to me’.

  ‘Do you think a shilling?’

  ‘A point?’

  ‘Just as you like,’ he said.

  I saw myself a financial cripple, perhaps a bankrupt; but it seemed impossible without vulgarizing the lofty accent of our intercourse, to suggest a humbler sum.

  ‘The game generally ends all square, doesn’t it?’ I said, flying in the face of experience.

  ‘I have known it not,’ he admitted.

  ‘You think, perhaps——?’ Longingly I eyed the ignoble straw, not daring to clutch it. But he had seen it too.

  ‘Well, I really meant a shilling a hundred.’

  We were saved. But with what expense of spirit, with what reckless doles of hostages to misunderstanding! The appearance of whisky, with all its mitigating accessories, turned on a cascade of major and minor invitations. Fortunately for this contingency I was armed with ready desires; I directed, encouraged and restrained with a will; and, as a small return on my former prodigious outlay of reluctant adaptability, I did find the water hotter the whisky smoother, the sugar sweeter, the whole brew more grateful and harmonious, for the fact that it had been extracted, fought for, out of the inmost pattern and texture of p
olite behaviour. It was a stolen water, and if I had received it with some natural colloquialism such as ‘Whisky, not half!’ it would have tasted brackish and bitter. Instead, all the pleased propitiated forces of convention and propriety came to its aid, and poured their cautious sweetness into the cup. When, like a climacteric, the last invitation came, the invitation to bed, final and inevitable as I felt it to be, I detected stirrings of revolt, I almost jibbed. A defiant impulse came to me, as it might come to one on the summons of the Last Trump, to turn a deaf ear, to tender a qualified compliance, to suggest an alternative; almost to refuse.

  But here I was in bed, and I had gone quietly enough. Refusal! that was the obverse of the golden coin that we had tossed each other, with rigid dexterity, throughout the evening. But only at the last had I managed to catch a glimpse of it; invitation’s suave, deferential head was ever uppermost. I pondered over classical invitations: Weber’s to the Valse; Shelley’s less specifically to Jane. They didn’t help because, from their buoyant confident tone one could see they didn’t contemplate a refusal. But to all Oswald’s invitations an engraved, an almost embossed R.S.V.P., was palpably subscribed. If he had just said ‘Come away!’ without troubling to call me ‘best and brightest’ or comparing the weather unfavourably with me, I would have gone with a light heart, ready for any enterprise, even excavations at Clum. Or if he had piped to me in Weber’s florid strain I would have cried shame on my poor spirit, and plunged into the dance. And that was what he would have done before my visit, or the mysterious cause that determined my visit, had cast its blighting spell. I should have been given no time to decide; my hesitations and doubts would have been overridden or tossed aside, my self-consciousness anaesthetized. Instead of losing myself in this delirious experience I was condemned to sit eating unpalatable blackberries at a respectful distance from the still smouldering embers of the Burning Bush—for its blaze and crackle illuminated memory, unquenched by the berries’ bitter juice. And for music I had the refrain of ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, join,’ well what? The figured, frigid capering of conventional ghosts. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want not to. Oswald flattered himself when he took such elaborate precautions against a possible refusal. It was a strain, too, negotiating his insipid proposals, threading my way through the tiresome labyrinth that promised no Minotaur.