Walter shook his head.
It was Tuesday; Walter Streeter had plenty of time to think about the week-end. At first he felt he would not be able to live through the interval, but strange to say his confidence increased instead of waning. He set himself to work as though he could work, and presently he found he could—differently from before, and, he thought, better. It was as though the nervous strain he had been living under had, like an acid, dissolved a layer of non-conductive thought that came between him and his subject: he was nearer to it now, and his characters, instead of obeying woodenly his stage directions, responded wholeheartedly and with all their beings to the tests he put them to. So passed the days, and the dawn of Friday seemed like any other day until something jerked him out of his self-induced trance and suddenly he asked himself, ‘When does a week-end begin?’
A long week-end begins on Friday. At that his panic returned. He went to the street door and looked out. It was a suburban, unfrequented street of detached Regency houses like his own. They had tall square gate-posts, some crowned with semi-circular iron brackets holding lanterns. Most of these were out of repair: only two or three were ever lit. A car went slowly down the street; some people crossed it: everything was normal.
Several times that day he went to look and saw nothing unusual, and when Saturday came, bringing no postcard, his panic had almost subsided. He nearly rang up the police station to tell them not to bother to send anyone after all.
They were as good as their word: they did send someone. Between tea and dinner, the time when week-end guests most commonly arrive, Walter went to the door and there, between two unlit gate-posts, he saw a policeman standing—the first policeman he had ever seen in Charlotte Street. At the sight, and at the relief it brought him, he realized how anxious he had been. Now he felt safer than he had ever felt in his life, and also a little ashamed at having given extra trouble to a hard-worked body of men. Should he go and speak to his unknown guardian, offer him a cup of tea or a drink? It would be nice to hear him laugh at Walter’s fancies. But no—somehow he felt his security the greater when its source was impersonal and anonymous. ‘P.C. Smith’ was somehow less impressive than ‘police protection’.
Several times from an upper window (he didn’t like to open the door and stare) he made sure that his guardian was still there; and once, for added proof, he asked his housekeeper to verify the strange phenomenon. Disappointingly, she came back saying she had seen no policeman; but she was not very good at seeing things, and when Walter went a few minutes later he saw him plain enough. The man must walk about, of course, perhaps he had been taking a stroll when Mrs. Kendal looked.
It was contrary to his routine to work after dinner but to-night he did, he felt so much in the vein. Indeed, a sort of exaltation possessed him; the words ran off his pen; it would be foolish to check the creative impulse for the sake of a little extra sleep. On, on. They were right who said the small hours were the time to work. When his housekeeper came in to say good night he scarcely raised his eyes.
In the warm, snug little room the silence purred around him like a kettle. He did not even hear the door bell till it had been ringing for some time.
A visitor at this hour?
His knees trembling, he went to the door, scarcely knowing what he expected to find; so what was his relief on opening it, to see the doorway filled by the tall figure of a policeman. Without waiting for the man to speak—
‘Come in, come in, my dear fellow,’ he exclaimed. He held his hand out, but the policeman did not take it. ‘You must have been very cold standing out there. I didn’t know that it was snowing, though,’ he added, seeing the snowflakes on the policeman’s cape and helmet. ‘Come in and warm yourself.’
‘Thanks,’ said the policeman. ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
Walter knew enough of the phrases used by men of the policeman’s stamp not to take this for a grudging acceptance. ‘This way,’ he prattled on. ‘I was writing in my study. By Jove, it is cold, I’ll turn the gas on more. Now won’t you take your traps off, and make yourself at home?’
‘I can’t stay long,’ the policeman said, ‘I’ve got a job to do, as you know.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Walter, ‘such a silly job, a sinecure.’ He stopped, wondering if the policeman would know what a sinecure was. ‘I suppose you know what it’s about—the postcards?’
The policeman nodded.
‘But nothing can happen to me as long as you are here,’ said Walter. ‘I shall be as safe . . . as safe as houses. Stay as long as you can, and have a drink.’
‘I never drink on duty,’ said the policeman. Still in his cape and helmet, he looked round. ‘So this is where you work,’ he said.
‘Yes, I was writing when you rang.’
‘Some poor devil’s for it, I expect,’ the policeman said.
‘Oh, why?’ Walter was hurt by his unfriendly tone, and noticed how hard his gooseberry eyes were.
‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ said the policeman, and then the telephone bell rang. Walter excused himself and hurried from the room.
‘This is the police station,’ said a voice. ‘Is that Mr. Streeter?’
Walter said it was.
‘Well, Mr. Streeter, how is everything at your place? All right, I hope? I’ll tell you why I ask. I’m sorry to say we quite forgot about that little job we were going to do for you. Bad co-ordination, I’m afraid.’
‘But,’ said Walter, ‘you did send someone.’
‘No, Mr. Streeter, I’m afraid we didn’t.’
‘But there’s a policeman here, here in this very house.’
There was a pause, then his interlocutor said, in a less casual voice:
‘He can’t be one of our chaps. Did you see his number by any chance?’
‘No.’
A longer pause and then the voice said:
‘Would you like us to send somebody now?’
‘Yes, p . . . please.’
‘All right then, we’ll be with you in a jiffy.’
Walter put back the receiver. What now? he asked himself. Should he barricade the door? Should he run out into the street? Should he try to rouse his housekeeper? A policeman of any sort was a formidable proposition, but a rogue policeman! How long would it take the real police to come? A jiffy, they had said. What was a jiffy in terms of minutes? While he was debating the door opened and his guest came in.
‘No room’s private when the street door’s once passed,’ he said. ‘Had you forgotten I was a policeman?’
‘Was?’ said Walter, edging away from him. ‘You are a policeman.’
‘I have been other things as well,’ the policeman said. ‘Thief, pimp, blackmailer, not to mention murderer. You should know.’
The policeman, if such he was, seemed to be moving towards him and Walter suddenly became alive to the importance of small distances—the distance from the sideboard to the table, the distance from one chair to another.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said. ‘Why do you speak like that? I’ve never done you any harm. I’ve never set eyes on you before.’
‘Oh, haven’t you?’ the man said. ‘But you’ve thought about me and’—his voice rose—’and you’ve written about me. You got some fun out of me, didn’t you? Now I’m going to get some fun out of you. You made me just as nasty as you could. Wasn’t that doing me harm? You didn’t think what it would feel like to be me, did you? You didn’t put yourself in my place, did you? You hadn’t any pity for me, had you? Well, I’m not going to have any pity for you.’
‘But I tell you,’ cried Walter, clutching the table’s edge, ‘I don’t know you!’
‘And now you say you don’t know me! You did all that to me and then forgot me!’ His voice became a whine, charged with self-pity. ‘You forgot William Stainsforth.’
‘William Stainsforth!’
‘Yes. I was your scapegoat, wasn’t I? You unloaded all your self-dislike on me. You felt pretty good while you were writing abo
ut me. You thought, what a noble, upright fellow you were, writing about this rotter. Now, as one W.S. to another, what shall I do, if I behave in character?’
‘I . . . I don’t know,’ muttered Walter.
‘You don’t know?’ Stainsforth sneered. ‘You ought to know, you fathered me. What would William Stainsforth do if he met his old dad in a quiet place, his kind old dad who made him swing?’
Walter could only stare at him.
‘You know what he’d do as well as I,’ said Stainsforth. Then his face changed and he said abruptly, ‘No, you don’t, because you never really understood me. I’m not so black as you painted me.’ He paused, and a flicker of hope started in Walter’s breast. ‘You never gave me a chance, did you? Well, I’m going to give you one. That shows you never understood me, doesn’t it?’
Walter nodded.
‘And there’s another thing you have forgotten.’
‘What is that?’
‘I was a kid once,’ the ex-policeman said.
Walter said nothing.
‘You admit that?’ said William Stainsforth grimly. ‘Well, if you can tell me of one virtue you ever credited me with—just one kind thought—just one redeeming feature——’
‘Yes?’ said Walter, trembling.
‘Well, then I’ll let you off.’
‘And if I can’t?’ whispered Walter.
‘Well, then, that’s just too bad. We’ll have to come to grips and you know what that means. You took off one of my arms but I’ve still got the other. “Stainsforth of the iron hand” you called me.’
Walter began to pant.
‘I’ll give you two minutes to remember,’ Stainsforth said. They both looked at the clock. At first the stealthy movement of the hand paralysed Walter’s thought. He stared at William Stainsforth’s face, his cruel, crafty face, which seemed to be always in shadow, as if it was something the light could not touch. Desperately he searched his memory for the one fact that would save him; but his memory, clenched like a fist, would give up nothing. ‘I must invent something,’ he thought, and suddenly his mind relaxed and he saw, printed on it like a photograph, the last page of the book. Then, with the speed and magic of a dream, each page appeared before him in perfect clarity until the first was reached, and he realized with overwhelming force that what he looked for was not there. In all that evil there was not one hint of good. And he felt, compulsively and with a kind of exaltation, that unless he testified to this the cause of goodness everywhere would be betrayed.
‘There’s nothing to be said for you!’ he shouted. ‘And you know it! Of all your dirty tricks this is the dirtiest! You want me to whitewash you, do you? The very snowflakes on you are turning black! How dare you ask me for a character? I’ve given you one already! God forbid that I should ever say a good word for you! I’d rather die!’
Stainsforth’s one arm shot out. ‘Then die!’ he said.
The police found Walter Streeter slumped across the dining-table. His body was still warm, but he was dead. It was easy to tell how he died; for it was not his hand that his visitor had shaken, but his throat. Walter Streeter had been strangled. Of his assailant there was no trace. On the table and on his clothes were flakes of melting snow. But how it came there remained a mystery, for no snow was reported from any district on the day he died.
THE TWO VAYNES
Those garden-statues! My host was pardonably proud of them. They crowned the balustrade of the terrace; they flanked its steps; they dominated the squares and oblongs—high, roofless chambers of clipped yew—which, seen from above, had somewhat the appearance of a chessboard. In fact, they peopled the whole vast garden; and as we went from one to another in the twilight of a late September evening, I gave up counting them. Some stood on low plinths on the closely-shaven grass; others, water-deities, rose out of goldfish-haunted pools. Each was supreme in its own domain and enveloped in mystery, secrecy and silence.
‘What do you call these?’ I asked my host, indicating the enclosures. ‘They have such an extraordinary shut-in feeling.’
‘Temene,’ he said, carefully stressing the three syllables. ‘Temenos is Greek for the precincts of a god.’
‘The Greeks had a word for it,’ I said, but he was not amused.
Some of the statues were of grey stone, on which lichen grew in golden patches; others were of lead, the sooty hue of which seemed sun-proof. These were already gathering to themselves the coming darkness: perhaps they had never really let it go.
It was the leaden figures that my host most resembled; in his sober country clothes of almost clerical cut—breeches, tight at the knee, surmounting thin legs cased in black stockings, with something recalling a Norfolk jacket on top—he looked so like one of his own duskier exhibits that, as the sinking sun plunged the temene in shadow, and he stood with outstretched arm pointing at a statue that was also pointing, he might have been mistaken for one.
‘I have another to show you,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll let you go and dress.’
Rather to my surprise, he took my arm and steered me to the opening, which, I now saw, was in the further corner. (Each temenos had an inlet and an outlet, to connect it with its neighbours.) As we passed through, he let go of my arm and bent down as though to tie up his shoe-lace. I walked slowly on towards a figure which, even at this distance, seemed in some way to differ from the others.
They were all gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs, dryads and oreads, divinities of the ancient world: but this was not. I quickened my steps. It was the figure of a man in modern dress, and something about it was familiar. But was it a statue? Involuntarily I stood still and looked back. My host was not following me; he had disappeared. Yet here he was, facing me, with his arm stretched out, almost as if he were going to shake hands with me. But no; the bent forefinger showed that he was beckoning.
Again I looked behind me to the opening now shrouded in shadow, but there was no one. Stifling my repugnance, and to be frank, my fear, and putting into my step all the defiance I could muster, I approached the figure. It was smiling with the faint sweet smile of invitation that one sees in some of Leonardo’s pictures. So life-like was the smile, such a close copy of the one I had seen on my host’s face, that I stopped again, wondering which to believe: my common sense or my senses. While I was debating, a laugh rang out. I jumped—the figure might have uttered it; it sounded so near. But the smiling features never changed, and a second later I saw my host coming to me across the grass.
He laughed again, less histrionically, and rather uncertainly I joined in.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you must forgive my practical joke. But you’ll understand how it amuses me to see what my guests will do when they see that figure. I’ve had a hole made through the hedge to watch. Some of them have been quite frightened. Some see through the trick at once and laugh before I get the chance to—the joke is then on me. But most of them do what you did—start and stop, and start and stop, wondering if they can trust their eyes. It’s fun watching people when they don’t know they are being watched. I can always tell which are the . . . the imaginative ones.’
I laughed a little wryly.
‘Cheer up,’ he said, though I would have rather he had not noticed my loss of poise. ‘You came through the ordeal very well. Not an absolute materialist like the brazen ones, who know no difference between seeing and believing. And not—certainly not—well, a funk, like some of them. Mind you, I don’t despise them for it. You stood your ground. A well-balanced man, I should say, hard-headed but open-minded, cautious but resolute. You said you were a writer?’
‘In my spare time,’ I mumbled.
‘Then you are used to looking behind appearances.’
While he was speaking, I compared him to the figure, and though the general resemblance was striking—the same bold nose, the same retreating forehead—I wondered how I could have been taken in by it. The statue’s texture was so different! Lead, I supposed. Having lost my superstitious horror, I came nearer
. I detected a thin crack in the black stocking, and thoughtlessly put my finger-nail into it.
‘Don’t do that,’ he warned me. ‘The plaster flakes off so easily.’
I apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to pull your leg. But is it plaster? It’s so dark, as dark as, well—your suit.’
‘It was painted that colour,’ my host said, ‘to make the likeness closer.’
I looked again. The statue’s face and hands were paler than its clothes, but only a pale shade of the same tone. And this, I saw, was true to life. A leaden tint underlay my host’s natural swarthiness.
‘But the other statues are of stone, aren’t they?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are. This one was an experiment.’
‘An experiment?’
‘My experiment,’ he said. ‘I made it.’ He did not try to conceal his satisfaction.
‘How clever of you!’ I exclaimed, stepping back to examine the cast more critically. ‘It’s you to the life. It almost seems to move.’
‘Move?’ he repeated, his voice distant and discouraging.
‘Yes, move,’ I said, excited by my fantasy. ‘Don’t you see how flat the grass is round it? Wouldn’t a statue let the grass grow under its feet?’
He answered still more coldly: ‘My gardeners have orders to clip the grass with shears.’
Snubbed and anxious to retrieve myself, I said, ‘Oh, but it’s the living image!’ I remembered the motto on his crested writing-paper. ‘Vayne sed non vanus. I adore puns. “Vayne but not vain.” You but not you. How do you translate it?’
‘We usually say, “Vayne but not empty”.’ My host’s voice sounded mollified.
‘How apt!’ I prattled on. ‘It’s Vayne all right, but is it empty? Is it just a suit of clothes?’
He looked hard at me and said:
‘Doesn’t the apparel oft proclaim the man?’
‘Of course,’ I said, delighted by the quickness of his answer. But isn’t this Vayne a bigger man than you are—in the physical sense, I mean?’
‘I like things to be over-life size,’ he replied. ‘I have a passion for the grand scale.’
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 49