The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘It’s rather isolated,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t mind that, but he does.’

  ‘Was that the real reason?’ I asked, but she refused to answer.

  I didn’t meet Victor Chisholm until we assembled for drinks before dinner. He was a nondescript looking man, neither dark nor fair, tall nor short, fat nor thin, young nor old. I didn’t have much conversation with him, but he seemed to slide off any subject one brought up—he didn’t drop it like a hot coal, but after a little blowing on it, for politeness’ sake, he quietly extinguished it. At least that was the impression I got. He smiled quite a lot, as though to prove he was not unsociable, and then retired into himself. He seemed to be saving himself up for something—a struggle with his neurosis, perhaps. After dinner we played bridge, and Victor followed us into the library, half meaning to play, I think; but when he found there was a four without him he went back into the drawing-room to join the three non-bridge playing members of the party. We sat up late trying to finish the last rubber, and I didn’t see him again before we went to bed. The library had a large open fireplace in which a few logs were smouldering over a heap of wood-ash. The room had a shut-in feeling, largely because the door was lined with book-bindings to make it look like shelves, so that when it was closed you couldn’t tell where it was. Towards midnight I asked Nesta if I should put another log on and she said carelessly, ‘No. I shouldn’t bother—we’re bound to get finished sometime, if you’ll promise not to overbid, Hugo,’ which reminded me of Victor and his complex. So when at last we did retire I said meaningly, ‘Would you like me to take a look at the drawing-room fire, Nesta?’

  ‘Well, you might, but it’ll be out by this time,’ she said.

  ‘And the dining-room?’ I pursued, glancing at the others, to see if there was any reaction, which there was not. She frowned slightly and said, ‘The dining-room’s electric. We only run to two real fires,’ and then we separated.

  In spite of my boasting, for some reason I couldn’t get to sleep. I tossed to and fro, every now and then turning the light on to see what time it was. My bedroom walls were painted dark blue, but by artificial light they looked almost black. They were so shiny and translucent that when I sat up in bed I could see my reflection in them, or at any rate my shadow. I grew tired of this and then it occurred to me that if I had a book I might read myself to sleep—it was one of the recognized remedies for insomnia. But I hadn’t: there were two book-ends—soap-stone elephants, I remember, facing each other across an empty space. I gave myself till half-past two, then I got up, put on my dressing-gown and opened my bedroom door. All was in darkness. The library lay at the other end of the long house and to reach it I had to cross the hall. I had no torch and didn’t know where the switches were, so my progress was slow. I tried to make as little noise as possible, then I remembered that if Nesta heard me she would think I was Victor Chisholm going his nightly rounds. After this I grew bolder and almost at once found the central switch panel at the foot of the staircase. This lit up the passage to the library. The library door was open and in I went, automatically fumbling for the switch. But no sooner had my hand touched the wall than it fell to my side, for I had a feeling that I was not alone in the room. I don’t know what it was based on, but something was already implicit in my vision before it became physically clear to me: a figure at the far end of the room, in the deep alcove of the fireplace, bending, almost crouching over the fire. The figure had its back to me and was so near to the fire as to be almost in it. Whether it made a movement or not I couldn’t tell, but a spurt of flame started up against which the figure showed darker than before. I knew it must be Victor Chisholm and I stifled an impulse to say ‘Hullo!’—from a confused feeling that like a sleep-walker he ought not to be disturbed; it would startle and humiliate him. But I wanted a book, and my groping fingers found one. I withdrew it from the shelf, but not quite noiselessly, for with the tail of my eye I saw the figure move.

  Back in my room I wondered if I ought to have left the hall lights on for Victor’s return journey, but at once concluded that as he hadn’t turned them on himself, he knew his way well enough not to need them. A sense of achievement possessed me: I had caught my fellow-guest out, and I had got my book. It turned out to be the fourth volume of John Evelyn’s Diary; but I hadn’t read more than a few sentences before I fell asleep.

  When I met Victor Chisholm at breakfast I meant to ask him how he had slept. It was an innocent, conventional inquiry, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to put it. Instead, we congratulated each other on the bright, frosty, late October morning, almost as if we had been responsible for it. Presently the two other men joined us, but none of the ladies of the party, and lacking their conversational stimulus we relapsed into silence over our newspapers.

  But I didn’t want to keep my adventure to myself, and later in the morning, when I judged that Nesta would not be preoccupied with household management, I waylaid her.

  ‘Your friend Victor Chisholm has been on the tiles again,’ I began, and before she could get a word in I told her the story of last night’s encounter. Half-way through I was afraid it might fall flat, for, after all, her guest’s peculiarities were no news to her; but it didn’t. She looked surprised and faintly worried.

  ‘I oughtn’t to have told you,’ I said with assumed contrition, ‘but I thought it would amuse you.’

  She made an effort to smile.

  ‘Oh well, it does,’ she said, and then her serious look came back. ‘But there’s one thing that puzzles me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He told me he had had a very good night.’

  ‘Oh well, he would say that. It’s only civil if you’re staying in someone’s house. I should have said the same if you had asked me, only I thought you would want to hear about Victor.’

  Nesta didn’t take this up.

  ‘But we know each other much too well,’ she said, arguing with herself. ‘Victor comes down here—well, he comes pretty often, and he always tells me if he’s been taking his security measures. I can’t understand it.’

  Why does she seem so upset? I asked myself. Does she care more for Victor than she admits? Is she distressed by the thought that he should lie to her? Does she suspect him of infidelity?

  ‘Oh, I expect he thought that for once he wouldn’t bother you,’ I said.

  ‘You’re quite sure it was Victor?’ she asked, with an effort.

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Who else could it have been?’

  ‘Well, somebody else looking for a book.’

  I said I thought this most unlikely. ‘Besides, he wasn’t looking for a book. He was looking at the fire—I think he stirred it with his foot.’

  ‘Stirred it with his foot?’

  ‘Well, something made a flame jump up.’

  Nesta said nothing, but looked more anxious than before.

  Hoping to make her say something that would enlighten me, I observed jokingly:

  ‘But he’s come to the right place. I saw a row of buckets in the hall and one of those patent fire-extinguishers——’

  ‘Oh, Walter insisted on having them,’ said Nesta, hurriedly. ‘This is a very old house, you know, and we have to take reasonable precautions. Having a fire-complex doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as having a fire, any more than having persecution mania means there isn’t such a thing as persecution.’

  Then I remembered something.

  ‘If he doesn’t want to be taken for a burglar,’ I said, ‘why doesn’t he turn on the lights?’

  ‘But he does turn them on,’ said Nesta, just for that reason.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He didn’t turn them on last night.’

  The problem of Victor’s nocturnal ramblings exercised me and made me unsociable. I never enjoy desultory conversation, and our pre-luncheon chit-chat seemed to me unusually insipid. So when the meal was over I excused myself from playing golf, though I had brought my clubs with me, and
announced that I was going to have a siesta as I had slept badly. There was a murmur of sympathy, but Nesta made no comment and no one, least of all Victor, betrayed uneasiness.

  In the middle of the afternoon I woke up and had an idea. I strode down to the village to search out the oldest inhabitant. To my surprise I found him, or his equivalent, digging in his front garden. Leaning over the wall I engaged him in conversation; and very soon he told me what I had somehow expected to hear, though, me so many pieces of knowledge that one picks up, it was difficult to act upon, and I rather wished I had never heard it. What chiefly intrigued me was the question: Did Victor know what I knew? It was clear, I thought, that Nesta did. But had she told him?

  I did not think that I could ask her, it would seem too like prying; besides if she had wanted to tell me, she would have told me. What I had heard could be held to explain a good many things.

  My secret gnawed at me and made the social contacts of the party seem unreal, as though I were a Communist in a Government office, my only accomplice being the head of the Department.

  Suddenly, after tea I think it was, the conversation turned my way.

  ‘Is the house haunted, Nesta?’ asked one of the visitors, a woman, who like myself was a stranger to the house. ‘It ought to be—it wouldn’t be complete without a ghost!’

  I watched Nesta as she answered carefully, ‘No, I’m afraid I must disappoint you—it isn’t.’ And I watched Victor Chisholm, but he kept what might have been called his poker face—if it had been sinister, which it was not. The speaker wasn’t to be satisfied; she returned to the charge more than once, suggesting various phantoms suitable to Monkshood Manor; but Nesta disowned them all, finally suppressing them with a yawn. One by one, on various pretexts, the company disbanded, and Victor Chisholm and I were left alone.

  ‘I once stayed in a country house that was said to be haunted,’ I remarked chattily.

  ‘Oh, did you?’ he said, with his air of being politely pleased to listen, while he was saving himself up for something in which one had no concern; ‘was it fun?’

  ‘Well, not exactly fun,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it if you can. bear to hear. The house was an old one, like this, and the land on which it stood had belonged to the Church. Well, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries they pulled the Abbey, or whatever it was, down, and used some of the stones for building this house I’m telling you about. Nobody could stop them. But one of the old monks who had fallen into poverty, as a result of being dissolved, and who remembered the bygone days when they feasted and sang and wassailed and got fat and clapped each other on the back in the way you see in the pictures—he felt sore about it, and on his deathbed he laid a curse on the place and swore that four hundred years later he would come back from wherever he was and set fire to it.’

  I watched Victor Chisholm for some sign of uneasiness but he showed none and all he said was:

  ‘Do you think a ghost could do that? I’ve always understood that it wasn’t very easy to set a house on fire. It isn’t very easy to light a fire, is it, when it’s been laid for the purpose, with paper and sticks and so on.’

  This, I thought—and I congratulated myself upon my subtlety—is the voice of reassurance speaking: this is what well-meaning people tell him, and what he tells himself, hoping to calm his fears.

  ‘I’m not up in the subject of ghosts,’ I said, ‘but they can clank chains and presumably some of them come from a hot place and wouldn’t mind handling a burning brand or two. Or kicking one. That fire in the library, for instance——’

  ‘Oh, but surely,’ he said—and I saw that I had scared him—‘the library fire is absolutely safe? I—I’m sometimes nervous about fires myself, but I should never bother about that one. There’s so much stone flagging around it. Do you really think——’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, feeling I had the answer to one of my questions. ‘But my hostess at the time was certainly apprehensive. I had to worm the story out of her. It’s a very usual one, of course, almost the regulation legend, very boring, really.’

  ‘And was the house ever burnt down?’ asked Victor.

  ‘I never heard,’ I said.

  Of course Victor might have been dissembling. He might have known the legend of Monkshood Manor, he might have been afraid of the library fire: neurotic people are notoriously given to lying. But I didn’t think so. Yet the alternative was too fantastic. I couldn’t believe in it either, and gradually (for logic can sometimes be bluffed) I succeeded in disbelieving both alternatives at once.

  Before nightfall I took the precaution of furnishing my blue room with books more interesting than Evelyn’s Diary. But I didn’t need them. I slept excellently, and so, to judge from discreet inquiries I made in the morning, did the rest of the party.

  I couldn’t get much out of Nesta. She rather avoided me, and for the first time in my life I felt like a policeman who must be treated with reserve in case he finds out too much. I still persuaded myself that Victor Chisholm had been and had not been in the library in the early hours of Saturday morning: if pressed, I should have said he had been. The third possibility, put forward by Nesta, that another guest had been searching for a book, I dismissed. My theory was that Nesta had a superstitious dread of a fire breaking out at Monkshood Manor and was keeping Victor in ignorance while she availed herself of his services as a night-watchman without warning him of the risk he ran.

  Risk? There was no risk: yet I vaguely felt that I ought to do something about it, so I tried to make my social prevail over my private conscience and throw myself into the collective life of a week-end party. I thought about the form my coming Collins would take, and wondered if I ought to apologize for being a dull guest. In the meantime I could search Nesta out and make amends for something that I felt had been slightly critical in my attitude towards her.

  My quest took me to the library. Nesta was not there but someone was—a housemaid on her hands and knees working vigorously at the carpet with a dust-pan and brush.

  ‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed, surprised into speech by the sight of such antiquated cleaning methods; ‘haven’t you got a vacuum cleaner?’

  The maid, who was pretty, looked up and said:

  ‘Yes, but it won’t bring these marks out.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘What sort of marks are they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the maid. ‘But they look like footmarks.’

  I bent down: they did look like footmarks, but they had another peculiarity which for some reason I refrained from commenting on. Instead I said, glancing at the fireplace:

  ‘It looks as though someone had been paddling in the ashes.’

  ‘That’s what I think,’ she said, leaning back to study the marks on the carpet.

  ‘Well, it’s clean dirt,’ I observed, ‘and should come off all right.’

  ‘Yes, it should,’ she agreed. ‘But it doesn’t. It’s my belief that it’s been burnt in.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I assured her, but curiosity overcame me, and I, too, got down on my hands and knees, and buried my nose in the carpet.

  ‘Hugo, what are you doing?’ said Nesta’s voice behind me.

  I jumped up guiltily.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she repeated almost sternly.

  I had an inspiration.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘I wanted to know whether this lovely Persian carpet had been dyed with an aniline dye. There’s only one way to tell, you know—by licking it. Aniline tastes sour.’

  ‘And does it?’ asked Nesta.

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘I’m glad of that,’ said Nesta, and leading me from the room she began to tell me the history of the carpet. This gave me an opportunity to praise the house and all its appointments.

  ‘What treasures you have, Nesta,’ I wound up. ‘I hope they are fully insured.’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ she answered, rather dryly. ‘But I didn’t know you were an expert on carpets, Hugo.’
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  As soon as I could I returned to the library. The maid had done her work well: hardly a trace of the footmarks remained, and the smell of burning, which I thought I had detected, clinging to them, had quite worn off. You could still see the track they made, away from the fireplace towards the door: but they didn’t reach the door or go in a direct line for it; they stopped at a point halfway between, against the inner wall, which was sheathed in books. There was nothing surprising in that: after a few steps the ashes would have been all rubbed off.

  And there was another thing I couldn’t see, and almost wondered if I had seen it—the mark of the big toe, which showed that the feet had been bare. Victor might have come down in his bare feet, to avoid making a noise; but it was odd, all the same, if not as odd as I had first thought it.

  In the afternoon we went a long motor drive in two cars to have tea with a neighbour. As soon as Monkshood Manor was out of sight its problems began to fade, and in the confusion of the two parties joining forces round the tea-table they seemed quite unreal. And even when the house came into view again, stretched cat-like beyond the lawn, I only felt a twinge of my former uneasiness. By Sunday evening a week-end visit seems almost over; the threads with one’s temporary residence are snapping; mentally one is already in next week. Before I got into bed I took out my diary and checked up my engagements. They were quite ordinary engagements for luncheon and dinner and so on, but suddenly they seemed extraordinarily desirable. I fixed my mind on them and went to sleep thinking about them.

  I even dreamed about them, or one of them. It started as an ordinary dinner party but one of the guests was late and we had to wait for him. ‘Who is he?’ someone asked, and our host answered, ‘I don’t know, he will tell us when he comes.’ Everyone seemed to accept this answer as reasonable and satisfactory, and we hung about talking and sipping cocktails until our host said, ‘I don’t think he can be coming after all. We won’t wait any longer.’ But just as we were sitting down to dinner there was a knock at the door and a voice said, ‘May I come in?’ And then I saw that we weren’t at my friend’s house in London, but back again at Monkshood, and the door that was opening was the library door, which was lined with bindings to make it look like bookshelves. For some reason it wasn’t at the end of the wall but in the middle; and I said, ‘Why is he coming in by that door?’ ‘Because it’s the door he used to use,’ somebody answered. The door was a long time opening, and it seemed to be opening by itself with nobody behind it; then came a hand and a sleeve—and a figure wearing a monk’s cowl.