‘There are the others, of course.’
‘The others?’
‘Yes, there are seven of us, but we could all squeeze in.’
‘Haven’t I told you I don’t want to let the rooms?’ cried Cyril in mounting exasperation.
‘Yes, but hadn’t you better think again, and take us in, since you can’t keep us out?’
‘Can’t keep you out?’ repeated Cyril, staring at him. ‘You’ll see if I can’t keep you out!’
He jumped to his feet. The man rose too, huge, powerful, immovable, the heaviest single object in the room. But when Cyril threw himself on him he wasn’t there—he had dissolved into a black mist, impalpable to Cyril’s groping hands. When Cyril came to himself he was back in his chair, his mind awhirl with conflicting speculations. Who was he? Where was he? Had he fainted? Had he been asleep?
He glanced at the clock. Nearly half-past eleven. Why didn’t Mr. Snow come? Had something happened to him? Ought Cyril to go in search of him? ‘Mr. Snow! Mr. Snow!’ No good calling him; whether he was upstairs, in his own rooms, or downstairs, in those other rooms, he could never hear, so many doors and staircases intervened.
If anything had happened to Mr. Snow it would be Cyril’s fault for letting him take the risk, an elderly man armed only with a torch. Supposing he wasn’t in the house at all, supposing he had seen something that upset him, and had wandered into the streets? Then Cyril would be quite alone in the house, at anybody’s mercy.
So when the knock came, he didn’t at once answer it, not knowing who the visitor might be. And when it turned out to be Mr. Snow, with his thin Vandyck face and steady eyes, Cyril could hardly refrain from some demonstration of joy—shaking hands with him or even kissing him. Back to normal! Normal might be a dull-sounding word, but how blessed it was when applied to the temperature or the spirits! Down to normal, up to normal, dead normal.
‘I didn’t come before, sir,’ Mr. Snow apologized, ‘because I heard that you had company.’
‘Company, Mr. Snow?’
‘Yes, sir, I heard you talking to someone.’
Cyril was silent; then he said:
‘You heard me talking to someone, but did you hear anyone talking to me?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ Mr. Snow’s tone registered a slight affront. ‘I heard your voice, sir, and then of course I didn’t listen any longer. I thought someone had dropped in to call on you.’
‘But wasn’t the street door locked?’
‘No, sir, nor the door downstairs, because I hadn’t done my round yet. Actually, I came in from the garden through “their” door, you know.’ The Trimbles were always ‘they’ to Mr. Snow.
‘Did you see anyone in the garden?’
‘Well, sir, I might have seen someone, some unauthorized person, I won’t say that I didn’t, but you know how dark it is, I couldn’t be sure. I switched my torch on, because you can’t be too careful, but I didn’t see what you could call a person. Were you thinking it might have been your visitor, sir?’
‘Yes—no—I——’
‘Anyhow,’ said Mr. Snow firmly, ‘I’m glad to be able to report that all is now present and correct. Good night, sir.’ Giving his little salute, Mr. Snow withdrew.
All absent and correct, yes; all present and incorrect, yes; but present and correct, no: the two ideas were mutually exclusive. Conscientious as Mr. Snow undoubtedly was, sharp as his old eyes might be, certain things were outside his range of vision, if not beyond his hearing. He might not see what there was to see, and it wouldn’t be fair, in future, to let him take the risk. Cyril waited till he was out of earshot, then took the torch he had left on the hall table, and with stealthy tread began to grope his way downstairs—an anonymous, questing figure, invisible behind his torch, his whereabouts unknown.
Was he the something his visitor had come to look for? Was he? Was he? He felt lost now: what would it feel like to be found?
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
Frederick Cross had lost his diary and without it he was, in the face of the future, helpless. He relied on it absolutely. The mere act of writing in it left as little impression in his memory as if his memory had been the sands of the seashore. He had to have the book itself. ‘Bring me my tablets!’
But no one in Smith’s Hotel, where he was staying, could bring them, and retribution had come swiftly, for this very evening he was expecting some people to dinner and he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know their names and wouldn’t recognize their faces. He just remembered he had asked them for to-night.
It would have been very much worse, of course, if it had been the other way round—if he had been dining with them. That would have been a real settler. The only hope was that they would ring him up to confirm the engagement—a very slender hope. They still might, though it was now half-past seven, and dinner was at eight.
He remembered how the invitation had come about: it had come about, as invitations often do, at a cocktail-party. His host had led him up to Mr. Blank and said: ‘I am sure you will have a lot to talk to each other about, Fred. Mr. Blank has just started as a publisher, and he is very much interested in the Jacobean Dramatists.’
Fred had written a book on the Jacobean Dramatists which no publisher had seen fit to take. With almost indecent haste he had invited Mr. Blank to dinner, and for good measure had included his wife in the invitation. Hardly had he got the words out, and given the publisher his address and the time for meeting, when they were swept away from each other. He had had no time to take in his interlocutor’s appearance; not a single feature remained in his memory, and as for the wife, he never saw her, though he understood she was at the party.
However, in a few minutes the mystery would be solved. He had nothing to do but wait, and the hotel porter would announce his guests. To ensure that this should happen he lingered in his bedroom; the porter would then have to ring him up and notify him of the guests’ arrival.
Punctually at eight o’clock the telephone bell rang and the porter’s voice said: ‘A lady and gentleman to see you, sir.’ ‘What is their name?’ Fred asked, but disappointingly the porter had rung off.
The couple were standing in the lounge, the middle lounge, for there were three: one across the passage, one divided from the middle lounge by a wall of glass. Fred Cross went up to greet his guests.
‘This is my wife, Mr. Cross,’ the man said, introducing a rather florid-looking lady, whose face broke into a smile with many lateral wrinkles. The man was tall and dark and clean-shaven, it wasn’t easy to place him; he didn’t look especially like a publisher, but then what publisher does? He didn’t look like anyone whom Fred remembered; but there was nothing remarkable in that: the party had been a blur of faces.
When they had sat down with their inevitable dry martinis and had exchanged a few platitudes about the weather (it was a coldish night in November) the man said:
‘We are particularly pleased to see you, Mr. Cross, because there is a matter in which I think we could help each other. I daresay you know what it is.’
Fred was, on the whole, a man of direct speech and inclined to come to the point straightaway; but he was used to the oblique approach of business men, and ready to adopt it.
‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘I rather think I do.’ In his mind’s eye he saw the typescript of his work on the Jacobean Dramatists, which the hands of many publishers’ readers had dog-eared. At the risk of sounding facetious he added, with a smile:
‘It’s to do with something that happened a good while ago.’
‘Yes, it is,’ the man said. He did not smile, but his wife smiled brilliantly, showing her teeth.
‘When we have talked it over,’ said the man, ‘perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming round to our place, where you may find one or two more who are interested. Joe Cossage, for instance.’ He looked at Fred Cross rather closely.
The name Joe Cossage conveyed nothing to Fred, but the field of Jacobean studies was a wide one, and he couldn’t be ex
pected to have heard of all the gleaners in it.
‘I should be delighted,’ he said, trying to conceal his eagerness. ‘But shouldn’t we have dinner first?’
‘Dinner?’ said the man, and if Fred hadn’t been so engrossed in thinking about his book, he would have noticed the question mark and the time-lag before his guest said: ‘Dinner would be a very good idea.’
‘Of course, I haven’t got the book with me,’ Fred remarked.
‘We didn’t suppose you would have, did we, Wendy?’ the man said to his wife who flashed her smile at his unsmiling face. ‘But we should like to have a look at it, I can tell you, and so would Joe.’
‘I mean, I haven’t got it here,’ said Fred, blushing for himself and his over-eagerness to sell his wares. ‘As it happens——’ he tried to make his voice sound casual—‘as it happens I’ve got it upstairs.’
‘Whew!’ said the man, and something that might have been his soul, if he had one, seemed to appear in his face, so intense was his expression. ‘Can we wait till after dinner, Wendy?’
‘If Mr. Cross wants us to, I’m sure we can,’ his wife said.
‘Oh, yes, let’s wait till afterwards,’ said Fred, lightly. He regretted his unbusiness-like precipitancy, now that he saw that the others were anxious to see the book as he was to show it to them.
‘As long as you don’t change your mind about it,’ said the man. ‘We weren’t sure you’d want us to see it, were we, Wendy?’
‘Joe thought he’d come across with it,’ his wife said, smiling.
‘Well, a lot hangs on it, you see,’ the man said, ‘a lot hangs on it. That’s why we weren’t sure——’
‘And a lot hangs on it for me, too,’ Fred Cross interrupted.
The man glanced at him quickly. ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ he said. ‘That’s why we thought persuasion might be necessary.’
Fred felt immensely flattered. Persuasion, indeed! If they only knew how he was longing to part with his treasure! But he mustn’t let them know. He had already shown his hand too plainly.
‘I won’t be too unreasonable,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you as far as I can.’
The man seemed to notice his change of tone, for he said:
‘We don’t want just to look at it, you know. We want to have it.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Fred Cross said soothingly. ‘After dinner we can talk about terms.’
‘We’d better do that at our place,’ the man said.
‘Just as you like,’ said Fred Cross, rather grandly. ‘Now what about another round of drinks?’
They agreed. As Fred was going to the bar to give his order the porter came up to him and said: ‘A lady and gentleman have just come and asked for you, sir.’
‘Another lady and gentleman?’
‘Yes, sir, there they are. They came a second ago, sir. I was just going to tell you.’
Fred followed the porter’s eye. The couple were standing in the next lounge, with their backs to him, looking about them with the relaxed curiosity of people whose minds are comfortably on their dinners.
Oh, that damned diary! Here was another muddle. What was he to do? Five was an awkward number. How did he know the two couples would mix? And how could he introduce them to each other when he didn’t know either of their names? Perhaps the porter could enlighten him.
‘They didn’t give a name, sir,’ the porter said. ‘They simply asked for you.’
Just as he feared! What an embarrassment to have to ask the two couples to introduce themselves to each other, and also to him! And who were the second couple, anyway? From a back view he didn’t seem to know them, either. But better not look. He would have to act quickly. It would be a disaster, he now saw, if the second couple stayed, just as he was on the point of concluding a deal with these new publishers. For politeness’ sake they would all have to talk about other things, and the opportunity might slip through his fingers, never to return. He must get rid of them.
To give himself a breathing space, he said to the porter:
‘Perhaps another time you would ask visitors to give their names?’—but even while he saw the man’s face stiffening under the rebuke he remembered that he might need his co-operation, that in fact he needed it now, and added quickly:
‘Charlie, would you do this for me? Tell the lady and gentleman that I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve been taken ill, in fact I am in bed, and I can’t give them dinner to-night. I shall be in the bar—just tell me if it’s O.K.’
He crossed the bar (ill-omened phrase) and in a minute or two the porter informed him that the couple had gone. ‘They said they were very sorry to hear you were ill, sir,’ the man concluded, not altogether without malice.
‘Oh, well,’ Fred Cross sighed with relief, but he felt uncomfortable. He didn’t like telling lies or getting other people to tell them for him; and he was superstitious enough to wonder whether saying he was ill might not make him ill, or bring him bad luck in some way.
When he rejoined his guests he seemed to have been away for hours, though in fact it was only a few minutes. The arrival of the drinks coincided with his apologies and smoothed over the interruption; but the conversational thread had snapped and it was only when dinner had been some time under way that they picked it up again. His guests seemed to fight shy of it, and Fred wondered if this was a policy they had agreed on between themselves, while he was out of hearing, with a view to lowering the advance they were prepared to pay on the book, or the royalty, or both.
‘There are so many Smith’s Hotels in London,’ the woman was saying, with her bright automatic smile, ‘almost as many as there are Smith’s bookshops. We weren’t quite sure which yours was.’
‘Joe told us it would be this one,’ said her husband, glancing at Fred.
Again Fred wondered who this Joe might be, who seemed so conversant with his whereabouts. But it wasn’t by any means the first time that a stranger to him had furnished a third party with his address. More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. But he had every reason to be grateful to Joe, whoever he was.
‘Yes, there are a lot of Smith’s Hotels,’ he agreed. ‘But,’ he added humorously, ‘I think this is the chief one. And for that matter’—the thought struck him suddenly—‘there are quite a lot of Frederick Crosses. It’s a common name. I know another myself.’
‘Yes, Joe thought there might be another,’ said the man, ‘but as it turned out he was wrong.’
‘I’m glad he was,’ said Fred. ‘I can’t think of another Fred Cross who has to do with books. And this hotel is quite a haunt of literary men.’
‘Of men with books to sell?’ said his guest, lowering one eyelid into what, if it had been more mirthful, might have been a wink.
‘Yes, men with books to sell,’ said Fred, delighted to have got back to books at last. ‘And men who have sold them too, of course. Now as for mine——’
‘We want to see the book first, you know, we want to know what’s in it, don’t we, Wendy?’
‘Oh, well, you shall,’ said Fred, cautious now in his turn, ‘that is if you’re really interested, as you seem to be.’ If they were on their guard, so would he be on his. He would whet their curiosity with hints. ‘I could give you a bit——’
‘All in good time,’ the man said hurriedly. ‘All in good time, but a list is what we want.’
‘A list of names, I mean,’ Fred went on, ‘my authorities—my colleagues, I suppose I could call them since I’m a bit of an authority myself—a bibliography, you know. And I’ve done quite a lot of research, too. I’ve dug about in all sorts of places that most people don’t know about, besides London and Oxford and Cambridge. Oh, I’ve unearthed some interesting facts—facts, let me tell you, not just hypotheses. You’d be surprised how much I’ve learnt.’
The husband and wife listened in silence; then the man said, sipping his wine, ‘It’s facts we’re chiefly interested in, facts and names. You said you went to Cambridge?’
‘Oh
, yes, I did quite a lot of work in Cambridge. In Cambridge it’s comparatively simple—people are ready to tell you what they know.’
‘Did you come across Ben Jonson in Cambridge?’ the man asked, lowering his voice.
Fred Cross laughed.
‘Oh, yes, of course I did.’
‘And Jack Webster?’
‘I expect you mean John Webster,’ Fred corrected him.
‘I daresay he’s called John sometimes,’ said the man.
‘Of course I know him,’ Fred said. ‘He’s my favourite. But I didn’t find out much about him.’
‘Your favourite, is he?’ the man said, disagreeably. ‘Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. And who else did you dig up? Did you dig up Dick Skipton?’
This name was strange to Fred. Was Dick Skipton a dramatist, or a critic, or a scholar—someone he ought to have heard of? He didn’t want to admit a gap in his omniscience, they would think the worse of him if he did, so he said casually, taking a chance, and hoping that Dick Skipton wasn’t dead, ‘If I didn’t meet him I heard a lot about him.’
‘You seem to be well in with the whole bunch,’ observed he man in a neutral voice, and his wife gave her quick smile, which seemed at the moment oddly out of place.
‘Well, it’s my job to be,’ said Fred Cross, modestly. ‘I’ve spent several years, you know, trailing them, tracking them down. I flatter myself that I know as much about them as anyone does. I believe that you are interested in them, too. If you care to ask me a question about any of them, sir, I should be only too glad to answer it if I can.’
Rather to Fred’s surprise, his guest didn’t take up the challenge. Instead he said, yawning into his wife’s smile:
‘I’m ready to take your word for it.’
Fred thought that this was carrying the pose of indifference rather far. ‘It’s been a labour of love, you know,’ he said. And when they looked rather rudely incredulous, he added: ‘It may be morbid of me, but I like the company of all those thugs and assassins.’
‘You’re welcome to them,’ the man said rather grimly. ‘But the main thing is, you’ve got their dossiers.’
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 75