‘Will you, won’t you?’ Well, I wouldn’t. I would refuse.
Daylight saw the ebb of my Dutch courage. It had receded infinitely far, leaving a barren strand. All day I waited for the tide to turn. On the horizon of my mind (never very distant, now stuffily close) I wrote the charmed word in letters of scarlet: refuse.
There seemed to be an opening at Clum. Among its treasures was a large squat perpendicular window, ribbed and tight-laced with massive angular tracery. Its forbidding aspect, presented successively to shrinking centuries, had kept injurious Time in awe. Oswald led me to a green knoll, which had a local reputation as a vantage-point from which this monster could be all too clearly seen. There it stood, or rather it didn’t stand, it came ‘at’ you, secure in its harsh virginity, unmarried and unmarred, one of survival’s most palpable mistakes. But Oswald invited my admiration; and I nearly withheld it. I hated to hear him speak with the voice if not with the accent (and that made it so much worse) of every tasteless tripper. And it wasn’t his voice; it was the voice that for the sake of safety, for the sake of maintaining the straddled flat-footed poise of the vulgar, he felt compelled to use to me. He wouldn’t be thrown off his balance; he would bring home to me, by the persistence with which he applauded the second-rate and took refuge, for opinion, in the second-hand, the fact that I ceased to count. How could I, with any feeling for my own dignity, challenge his impersonality? I should only succeed in being rude. It was the triumph of his policy to have brought our friendship to a pass where rudeness and disagreement were synonymous.
But I didn’t give up hope. I remembered my resolve; and though to my inspection the altar of friendship appeared as cold, as foreign to sacramental rites as Clum itself, I would still cling to it, though no one should take enough interest to pull me off it. All swabbed and scraped and slippery as it was, I couldn’t help thinking that an acolyte had lately been at work upon it, removing vestiges of former feasts. For though swept it wasn’t garnished, even with a vegetable marrow. It had an air of dereliction, I noted maliciously, not of preparation. The manger might be empty, but I was the only dog in the manger; it wasn’t coldly furnished forth with viands ear-marked for the next mongrel, denied to me. Oswald didn’t readily discuss our common friends, though after dinner I tried to draw him, by dangling names, into this, often the most rewarding of all forms of conversation. Perhaps it was snobbery; he wouldn’t rise to the minnows with which my poor line was forlornly baited. I had resolved not to change the direction of my attack, but to intensify it—to meet his most frigid propositions with passionate agreement, to glut his devouring sense of responsibility with continual titbits. Zealous as I was, he easily outstripped me in the competition for conferring favours. He looked all his own gift-horses in the mouth, before he presented them, whereas I was too apt to make mine show their paces, too raw not to recommend them. I felt as the evening drew on that something was sure to happen, some outburst, probably physical. He would scream, or I should. We were playing picquet and I had won the second partie.
‘I’m terribly afraid you’re rubiconed,’ I said, adding up the score for the third time.
‘Well,’ he replied, glancing sidelong at my figures, ‘I shall hope to do the same by you before the evening’s out.’
Hope stirred in me. Was there to be a show-down? His words had an ominous ring: last night we had been more jubilant under defeat.
‘I shall not grudge you the last laugh,’ I said, looking at him hard.
He laughed then, and rather bitterly, I thought.
‘It will be a new experience for me.’
‘Oh, surely,’ I protested. In vision I saw a series of week-end campaigns, lightning successes without a check; I saw too the casualties privately wringing their hands.
‘You held all the cards,’ he said, still a little resentful.
‘Oh, did I?’ I replied, and added, ‘But it was my misfortune. I’m so sorry.’
He took up the cards.
‘Should we cut?’
‘I think we might.’
‘After you, then.’
At length, all preliminary conditions satisfied, the game once more got under way.
‘And I’ve a quatorze of Kings, the whole phalanx,’ I heard my host say. It was the coup-de-grâce. I was ‘repiqued’.
‘Ninety-five,’ he announced.
‘Nothing.’
‘Ninety-six.’
‘Nothing.’
He played the cards almost vindictively, winning all the tricks and ‘capotting’ me. Again I noticed in his tone signs of excitement and satisfaction that were a betrayal of our code. We had taken our triumphs sadly.
‘With forty that makes you a hundred and forty-six,’ I said, ‘and nothing for me, poor me.’ I felt that, in view of his elation, I was entitled to a syllable of self-pity.
‘You’ve forgotten the last trick,’ he reminded me. ‘I had to work for it. That’s a hundred and forty-seven, please. And why “poor you”?’
I was still smarting under the ‘please’, trying to explain it away as ironical, when he repeated the question.
‘Why “poor you”?’
I really had to think. It would have been much easier simply to be annoyed.
‘Because I got nothing, I suppose,’ I said lamely. I thought it a sufficient explanation for a casual word, and even remarkably good-tempered. But it had an unsettling effect on Oswald. He rose and went to the fireplace.
‘But you have everything!’ he brought out at last. ‘Everything!’
Like a bankrupt and with the unenviable sensations of a bankrupt, I went over my meagre property, personal and real. The only considerable asset I had appeared to be my investment, my shares in the ‘concern’ that was Oswald—and then I was going to lose, had already lost. He couldn’t possibly—it was too heartless, be poking fun at my imminent destitution. He couldn’t seriously mean me to give him a financial statement—an outline of my ‘circumstances’. That they were straitened was common property—the only sort of property, in fact, in which they at all generously abounded. Judged by any standard the disparity in our fortunes was tremendous and the advantages all his. It was my luck with the cards, I decided, that had set growling the green-eyed monster, which must have slumbered since its owner’s childhood. And this was a childish outburst, a childish solecism which I would overlook.
‘I’ve been horribly lucky,’ I said, looking up at him. ‘I’ve won all along the line. And I won last night too.’
I had, a paltry hundred.
He laughed and returned to his chair.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did. But I wasn’t meaning that.’ His face narrowed over the cards.
What, then, did he mean? I longed to ask; and last night, fortified by toddy, perhaps I could have asked. But the interval had choked that weakling, our intimacy, beneath a jungle of misunderstanding and constraint. I could no more ask the question than an actor could show himself aware of a conventional aside spoken well within his hearing. And if the saving mood failed me then, the next morning at breakfast, a breakfast that looked so earnestly into the future that it seemed to have outrun the present and be taking place at the station or even in the train—this mood had faded into the shadow of a dream. I had ceased to take pains, ceased even to cling. I suppose I cut an awkward figure, realizing that if I didn’t stand on my dignity I didn’t stand at all. And it was from this pedestal, and not from the horns of Friendship’s altar, that I waved Oswald Clayton good bye.
As far as London allowed of it, I passed the week that followed my visit to Witheling End in seclusion. There was little to distract me. The cheerful or distinguished gatherings in which, as Oswald’s familiar, I had been welcome were closed to me; and I hadn’t the heart to ogle the other scarecrows of older standing, with which Oswald’s waste ground had been so thickly planted. Dully I realized that outlets were stopped up; but even if I were robbed of motion, socially paralysed, I could still hug my immobility and postpone the moment when
I too must flap and twirl for a warning to the rest. And so it was with sinking of the heart that I heard a bounding step on the stairs followed by a resounding voice. It was Ponting, the artist.
‘Ha!’ he said, drawing a fold of the window-curtain on to the table and sitting on it. ‘What are you doing here, with a face as long as three wet days?’ He had a vigorous vocabulary and his work was exuberantly morbid.
‘I pass away the time,’ I said.
‘You should have been where I’ve come from,’ he proclaimed. ‘Then you wouldn’t be looking like a candidate for confirmation.’ I disliked his tone, and felt little interest in the place that had made him what he was; but he forestalled my inquiry.
‘I’ve been at Witheling End.’
‘Why,’ I exclaimed in spite of myself, ‘I was there a week ago!’
‘And didn’t you enjoy it?’ he demanded.
‘If you mean in the sense that one enjoys poor health,’ I replied, ‘I enjoyed it immensely. Frankly, I loathed every minute of it.’
He examined me curiously, as though I had some disease.
‘Well!’ he declared. ‘You are a comical character.’
‘I didn’t amuse Oswald,’ I said.
At that he laughed aloud, slipped off the table and danced up and down the room chanting:
‘He’s one of Oswald’s misfits! He’s one of Oswald’s misfits!’
‘Tell me the secret of your success,’ I said, fascinated by his ungainly antics. ‘I suppose you fitted like a glove.’
My friend struck an attitude.
‘It was bone to his bone,’ he assured me.
I tried to visualize this composite skeleton.
‘When I arrived,’ he went on, ‘the place felt unhome-like. Oswald wanted to wrap me up in cotton-wool. But I soon put the lid on that.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘I waited till we were alone,’ said Ponting. His face wore a puzzled expression, as though he were inwardly marvelling at his own astuteness, and he spoke slowly and emphatically, studying the exits and apertures of my room, anxious to bring home to me, by pantomime, the very scent and savour of his discretion.
‘Yes?’ I said.
He looked at me hard, to make sure I had taken it in.
‘I waited till we were alone,’ he repeated, ‘and when we were alone I just touched him on the shoulder like that. Nothing more.’
He gave me a heavy pat. The ‘more’, from which he had refrained, would certainly have been a knock-down blow.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘and then?’
‘He seemed surprised,’ Ponting said, ‘so I drew him aside——’
‘But you told me you were alone,’ I objected.
‘I drew him aside,’ Ponting went on, ‘and said, “Now that we’re between ourselves, there’s something I want to say to you,” and Oswald said “Say on!” or something like that. I think it was “say on” he said.’
‘And what did you say?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t want to be heavy about it,’ Ponting remarked carelessly. ‘I said, “A truce to all this palaver. I shan’t melt, Oswald, and I shan’t break. There’s no need to treat me like a Vestal Virgin.” That was all; but it did the trick.’
‘What trick?’ I inquired.
‘Why,’ said Ponting, plunging into metaphor, ‘the Gateless Barrier was surmounted; the walls of Jericho fell down. It was his soul to my soul, from that time forth. We talked—it was more than that—we conversed; for all the world like two love-birds on an identical twig. “Spit it out,” I said, meaning his trouble, whatever it was. And he did, too. He told me everything.’
‘Ah!’I breathed.
‘I can’t remember his exact words,’ Ponting continued. ‘I can remember better what I said. But he told me he never meant a week-end party to be a frost; his true intent, he said, was all for our delight. That was an eye-opener to me, I tell you, and it sounded like a quotation, that’s how I came to recall it. He said he’d been afraid he’d offended me, and he mentioned you, and some others; so he asked us to Witheling End to make it up. He thought we had a down on him, while we thought he had a down on us,’ Ponting lucidly explained. ‘And then it struck me that I had been a bit snappy the last time he came to see me; I was feeling seedy, off colour, and got my tail thoroughly down. He stayed a long time and I got fed up, and said the studio wasn’t a home for lost animals.’
‘I didn’t say anything like that,’ I mused.
‘No?’ said Ponting. ‘Well, everyone has his own way of being rude. I didn’t mean any harm, but he must have taken it to heart. He said it made him nervous and shy, looking after people in his own house, especially when he felt he had got on their nerves. He did everything he could, he went out of his way to give them a jolly time; but it was killing work, he said, like trying to warm up an icicle; they just moped and drooped and dripped. What he really meant was, they were like warmed-up death. But he didn’t blame them; he said it was all his fault. Then we laughed over the whole affair. Lord, how we laughed! My sides still ache!’ He rocked with merriment and even I couldn’t help laughing a little.
‘Well,’ Ponting said at last, ‘I mustn’t stop any longer, mooning about. Oswald’s waiting for me.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Why, where I deposited him, I suppose,’ said Ponting. ‘To wit, at the foot of the stairs. He won’t thank me for telling you, though. He didn’t want you to know. Would you like to see him?’
I hesitated. ‘I thought I would wait until he called on me.’
Ponting burst into another guffaw. ‘But that’s just what he said about you!’
I began to feel rather foolish. ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Invite him to come up. But no, stop!’ I cried, for Ponting was already on the landing. ‘Tell him to come up!’
‘I’ll whistle him,’ said Ponting, and I stopped my ears. Ponting was a genius; I should never have thought of that.
MR. BLANDFOOT’S PICTURE
How it became known in Settlemarsh that Mr. Blandfoot was the owner of an interesting picture it would be hard to say: the rumour of its existence seemed to come simultaneously from many quarters. But in the full tide of its popularity as a subject of discussion, when its authorship was being eagerly disputed at greater and lesser tea-parties, the question of its origin got somehow overlooked. No one with any reverence for the established order of Settlemarsh society could doubt that Mrs. Marling, of The Grove, would be the first to pronounce judgment on it, or that Mrs. Pepperthwaite, of The Pergola, would be among the first to make inquiry about it: their respective roles were to ask questions and to answer them.
‘So you haven’t met him yet?’ suggested Mrs. Pepperthwaite.
As always, Mrs. Marling paused before replying, and fixed upon her interlocutor that wintry look which had blighted so much budding conversation.
‘Met him?’ she said. ‘No, why should I have met him?’
Mrs. Marling’s questions were generally rhetorical.
‘So you haven’t heard about his picture?’ Mrs. Pepperthwaite suggested.
‘I don’t see why you connect the two things,’ rejoined Mrs. Marling. ‘Have you heard about Raphael’s pictures?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you met Raphael?’
‘No, but Raphael is dead, and Mr. Blandfoot is very much alive; I only just missed him yesterday at Mrs. Peets’s. He had only that moment gone, she told me.’
‘I can’t think why you visit that woman,’ Mrs. Marling observed. ‘Tell me what you see in her.’
The conversation lapsed; but none the less a seed was sown, or rather it was watered. Of course, Mrs. Marling had heard about the picture; she heard about everything in Settlemarsh. But she never decided hastily. She collected evidence, she felt her way, and when the moment was ripe she acted. She invited or she did not invite, and on her action depended or was said to depend, the fate of the newcomer to Settlemarsh. It was chiefly due to her that though Settlemarsh was a large place i
ts society remained a small one. Her verdicts seemed capricious, but they were not really the outcome of caprice; she took her duties as social censor much more seriously than those who murmured at but accepted her decrees would have believed. The reasons she gave for disliking people were generally frivolous, and painful to the parties concerned when they became known, as they nearly always did; but at the back of them, as often as not, was a valid objection which she had unearthed with difficulty and which, to do her justice, she did not always make public.
When her guests had gone she retired to her room, and sitting before the tarnished Venetian mirror which gave back a very subdued version of her dark, intelligent, aquiline, handsome face, she wrote a note: but first, as was her habit, she addressed the envelope:
Mrs. Stornway,
The Uplands,
Little Settlemarsh.
Most of her friends lived in Little Settlemarsh; she herself still inhabited that part of the town which had been fashionable thirty years earlier.
Dearest Eva (she wrote),
I cannot quite forgive you for not coming here to-day. You would have been so bored! but at any rate I should have had some amusement. Foremost among the bores was (dare I say it?) your foundling, Mrs. Pepperthwaite, or words to that effect—I forget the exact name and her card, if it ever reached me, has been mislaid. Among other subjects that she touched but did not adorn was Mr. Blandfoot and his picture, gossip she had heard at Mrs. Peets’s. Now do tell me, what is all this about. And another time don’t desert your poor distracted friend,
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 43