The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley, Page 65

  In which of the outhouses he spent the night he never knew. But it gave him a sense of security so profound that under it he slept and slept and slept. Only by degrees, as he was crossing the courtyard in the broad daylight, did memory of the night before return to him, and then only as shapes and colours of feeling, not as facts. But by the time he reached his door he had more or less reconstructed the story. It horrified him; the future yawned at his feet.

  Hardly had he got into bed and kicked out his cold hot-water bottle when there came a knock at the door and Mrs. Weaver entered, bringing his morning tea. She drew the curtains and, without being asked, handed him his bed-jacket.

  ‘How is your neck this morning, sir?’ she inquired.

  Philip turned his head. It hurt him very much, which was strange, for he had felt nothing of it for ten hours.

  ‘Not much better, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘You should have let me rub it, sir. My husband——’

  ‘Ah, how good you were to him,’ said Philip. ‘And yet he died in the end, poor fellow.’

  She made no answer but sniffed the air and said,

  ‘There’s a slight smell of gas in here. Shall I open the window wider?’

  ‘Do.’

  ‘I always think gas is dangerous,’ she went on. ‘And so I’m afraid I must give in my notice.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Weaver!’

  ‘Yes, I must leave to-day, and I’ll forgo my wages. I had a dreadful dream.’

  ‘Oh, what?’

  ‘That I was being gassed. That I had put my head in a gas-oven. What could have made me dream that?’

  ‘What indeed? But dreams go by contraries, you know,’ said Philip.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Mrs. Weaver, pensively. ‘I’m not so sure. I’ve ordered the taxi for ten o’clock. I will cook your breakfast.’

  On an impulse Philip jumped out of bed. His foot struck against something hard—it was a skewer, a meat skewer.

  ‘Mrs. Weaver,’ he called after her, ‘you’ve forgotten something.’

  When she came back he handed her the skewer.

  ‘A skewer?’ she said. ‘However did that get here?’ It dropped from her fingers and lay between them, pointing, he was glad to see, in her direction. She stooped to pick it up.

  ‘No, leave it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it. And there are two things you can do for me.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘First, would you telephone to Shuttleworth Hospital and ask how Mrs. Featherstone is?’

  She came back with her neutral face, and said that Mrs. Featherstone had taken a turn for the better.

  ‘And now would you kindly put the bottle of wintergreen back into the medicine-cupboard?’

  From the bed he watched her open the bow-fronted doors. One glance showed him that all his magic apparatus of the night had been dismantled.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Do you know who tidied up the medicine-cupboard?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said, and closed the door behind her. Fingering the meat skewer, which was long, thin, sharp and crowned by the traditional crook, Philip almost, but not quite, believed her.

  Below him on the blue rep carpet, the Heriz rug, which had lain unregarded for the past few days, suddenly caught his eye. At first to his bewildered mind it seemed a rug like any other; then slowly it began to assert itself and declare its wordless message. Who had woven it, he wondered, who had coloured it with his thoughts? What passions had gone into it, at the confluence of the pale red and the dark? He could not tell nor did it matter; indeed nothing seemed to matter when once the silken spell began to work.

  THE WAITS

  Christmas Eve had been for all the Marriners, except Mr. Marriner, a most exhausting day. The head of the house usually got off lightly at the festive season, lightly that is as far as personal effort went. Financially, no; Mr. Marriner knew that financially quite a heavy drain was being made on his resources. And later in the evening when he got out his cheque-book to give his customary presents to his family, his relations and the staff, the drain would be heavier. But he could afford it, he could afford it better this Christmas than at any other Christmas in the history of his steadily increasing fortune. And he didn’t have to think, he didn’t have to choose; he only had to consult a list and add one or two names, and cross off one or two. There was quite a big item to cross off, quite a big item, though it didn’t figure on the list or on the counterfoil of his cheque-book. If he saw fit he would add the sum so saved to his children’s cheques. Jeremy and Anne would then think him even more generous than he was, and if his wife made any comment, which she wouldn’t, being a tactful woman, he would laugh and call it a Capital Distribution—‘capital in every sense, my dear!’

  But this could wait till after dinner.

  So of the quartet who sat down to the meal, he was the only one who hadn’t spent a laborious day. His wife and Anne had both worked hard decorating the house and making arrangements for the party on Boxing Day. They hadn’t spent the time in getting presents, they hadn’t had to. Anne, who was two years older than Jeremy, inherited her mother’s gift for present-giving and had made her selections weeks ago; she had a sixth sense for knowing what people wanted. But Jeremy had left it all to the last moment. His method was the reverse of Anne’s and much less successful; he thought of the present first and the recipient afterwards. Who would this little box do for? Who would this other little box do for? Who should be the fortunate possessor of this third little box? In present-giving his mind followed a one-way track; and this year it was little boxes. They were expensive and undiscriminating presents and he was secretly ashamed of them. Now it was too late to do anything more: but when he thought of the three or four friends who would remain un-boxed his conscience smote him.

  Silent and self-reproachful, he was the first to hear the singing outside the window.

  ‘Listen, there’s some carol-singers!’ His voice, which was breaking, plunged and croaked.

  The others all stopped talking and smiles spread over their faces.

  ‘Quite good, aren’t they?’

  ‘The first we’ve had this year,’ said Mrs. Marriner.

  ‘Well, not the first, my dear; they started coming days ago, but I sent them away and said that waits must wait till Christmas Eve.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘Two, I think,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘A man and a woman?’

  Jeremy got up and drew the curtain. Pierced only by a single distant street-lamp, the darkness in the garden pressed against the window-pane.

  ‘I can’t quite see,’ he said, coming back. ‘But I think it’s a man and a boy.’

  ‘A man and a boy?’ said Mr. Marriner. ‘That’s rather unusual.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re choristers, Daddy. They do sing awfully well.’

  At that moment the front-door bell rang. To preserve the character of the house, which was an old one, they had retained the original brass bell-pull. When it was pulled the whole house seemed to shudder audibly, with a strangely searching sound, as if its heart-strings had been plucked, while the bell itself gave out a high yell that split into a paroxysm of jangling. The Marriners were used to this phenomenon, and smiled when it made strangers jump: to-night it made them jump themselves. They listened for the sound of footsteps crossing the stone flags of the hall, but there was none.

  ‘Mrs. Parfitt doesn’t come till washing-up time,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘Who’ll go and give them something?’

  ‘I will,’ Anne said, jumping up. ‘What shall I give them, Daddy?’

  ‘Oh, give them a bob,’ said Mr. Marriner, producing the coin from his pocket. However complicated the sum required he always had it.

  Anne set off with the light step and glowing face of an eager benefactor; she came back after a minute or two at a much slower pace and looking puzzled and rather frightened. She didn’t sit down but stood over her place with her hands on the chair-back.

&nbs
p; ‘He said it wasn’t enough,’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t enough?’ her father repeated. ‘Did he really say that?’

  Anne nodded.

  ‘Well, I like his cheek,’ Even to his family Mr. Marriner’s moods were unforeseeable; by some chance the man’s impudence had touched a sympathetic chord in him. ‘Go back and say that if they sing another carol they shall have another bob.’

  But Anne didn’t move.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Daddy, I’d rather not.’

  They all three raised questioning faces to hers.

  ‘You’d rather not? Why?’

  ‘I didn’t like his manner.’

  ‘Whose, the man’s?’

  ‘Yes. The boy—you were right, Jeremy, it is a boy, quite a small boy—didn’t say anything.’

  ‘What was wrong with the man’s manner?’ Mr. Marriner, still genial, asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ Anne began to breathe quickly and her fingers tightened on the chair-back. ‘And it wasn’t only his manner.’

  ‘Henry, I shouldn’t——’ began Mrs. Marriner warningly, when suddenly Jeremy jumped up. He saw the chance to redeem himself in his own eyes from his ineffectiveness over the Christmas shopping—from the general ineffectiveness that he was conscious of whenever he compared himself with Anne.

  ‘Here’s the shilling,’ Anne said, holding it out. ‘He wouldn’t take it.’

  ‘This will make it two,’ their father said, suiting the action to the word. ‘But only if they sing again, mind you.’

  While Jeremy was away, they all fell silent, Anne still trying to compose her features, Mr. Marriner tapping on the table, his wife studying her rings. At last she said:

  ‘They’re all so class-conscious nowadays.’

  ‘It wasn’t that,’ said Anne.

  ‘What was it?’

  Before she had time to answer—if she would have answered—the door opened and Jeremy came in, flushed and excited but also triumphant, with the triumph he had won over himself. He didn’t go to his place but stood away from the table looking at his father.

  ‘He wouldn’t take it,’ he said. ‘He said it wasn’t enough. He said you would know why.’

  ‘I should know why?’ Mr. Marriner’s frown was an effort to remember something. ‘What sort of man is he, Jeremy?’

  ‘Tall and thin, with a pulled-in face.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  ‘He looked about seven. He was crying.’

  ‘Is it anyone you know, Henry?’ asked his wife.

  ‘I was trying to think. Yes, no, well, yes, I might have known him.’ Mr. Marriner’s agitation was now visible to them all, and even more felt than seen. ‘What did you say, Jeremy?’

  Jeremy’s breast swelled.

  ‘I told him to go away.’

  ‘And has he gone?’

  As though in answer the bell pealed again.

  ‘I’ll go this time,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘Perhaps I can do something for the child.’

  And she was gone before her husband’s outstretched arm could stop her.

  Again the trio sat in silence, the children less concerned with themselves than with the gleam that kept coming and going in their father’s eyes like a dipping headlight.

  Mrs. Marriner came back much more self-possessed than either of her children had.

  ‘I don’t think he means any harm,’ she said, ‘he’s a little cracked, that’s all. We’d better humour him. He said he wanted to see you, Henry, but I told him you were out. He said that what we offered wasn’t enough and that he wanted what you gave him last year, whatever that means. So I suggest we give him something that isn’t money. Perhaps you could spare him one of your boxes, Jeremy. A Christmas box is quite a good idea.’

  ‘He won’t take it,’ said Anne, before Jeremy could speak.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he can’t,’ said Anne.

  ‘Can’t? What do you mean?’ Anne shook her head. Her mother didn’t press her.

  ‘Well, you are a funny girl,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, we can but try. Oh, and he said they’d sing us one more carol.’

  They set themselves to listen, and in a moment the strains of ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’ began.

  Jeremy got up from the table.

  ‘I don’t believe they’re singing the words right,’ he said. He went to the window and opened it, letting in a puff of icy air.

  ‘Oh, do shut it!’

  ‘Just a moment. I want to make sure.’ They all listened, and this is what they heard:

  ‘God blast the master of this house,

  Likewise the mistress too,

  And all the little children

  That round the table go.’

  Jeremy shut the window. ‘Did you hear?’ he croaked.

  ‘I thought I did,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘But it might have been “bless”, the words sound so much alike. Henry, dear, don’t look so serious.’

  The door-bell rang for the third time. Before the jangling died down, Mr. Marriner rose shakily.

  ‘No, no, Henry,’ said his wife. ‘Don’t go, it’ll only encourage them. Besides, I said you were out.’ He looked at her doubtfully, and the bell rang again, louder than before. ‘They’ll soon get tired of it,’ she said, ‘if no one comes. Henry, I beg you not to go.’And when he still stared at her with groping eyes, she added:

  ‘You can’t remember how much you gave him last year?’ Her husband made an impatient gesture with his hand.

  ‘But if you go take one of Jeremy’s boxes.’

  ‘It isn’t a box they want,’ he said, ‘it’s a bullet.’

  He went to the sideboard and brought out a pistol. It was an old-fashioned saloon pistol, a relic from the days when Henry’s father, in common with others of his generation, had practised pistol-shooting, and it had lain at the back of a drawer in the sideboard longer than any of them could remember.

  ‘No, Henry, no! You mustn’t get excited! And think of the child!’

  She was on her feet now; they all were.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ he snarled.

  ‘Anne! Jeremy! Tell him not to! Try to stop him.’ But his children could not in a moment shake off the obedience of a lifetime, and helplessly they watched him go.

  ‘But it isn’t any good, it isn’t any good!’ Anne kept repeating.

  ‘What isn’t any good, darling?’

  ‘The pistol. You see, I’ve seen through him!’

  ‘How do you mean, seen through him? Do you mean he’s an imposter?’

  ‘No, no. I’ve really seen through him,’ Anne’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘I saw the street lamp shining through a hole in his head.’

  ‘Darling, darling!’

  ‘Yes, and the boy, too——’

  ‘Will you be quiet, Anne?’ cried Jeremy from behind the window curtain. ‘Will you be quiet? They’re saying something. Now Daddy’s pointing the gun at him—he’s got him covered! His finger’s on the trigger, he’s going to shoot! No, he isn’t. The man’s come nearer—he’s come right up to Daddy! Now he’s showing him something, something on his forehead-oh, if I had a torch—and Daddy’s dropped it, he’s dropped the gun!’

  As he spoke they heard the clatter; it was like the sound that gives confirmation to a wireless commentator’s words. Jeremy’s voice broke out again:

  ‘He’s going off with them—he’s going off with them! They’re leading him away!’

  Before she or any of them could reach the door, Mrs. Marriner had fainted.

  The police didn’t take long to come. On the grass near the garden gate they found the body. There were signs of a struggle—a slither, like a skid-mark, on the gravel, heel-marks dug deep into the turf. Later it was learnt that Mr. Marriner had died of coronary thrombosis. Of his assailants not a trace was found. But the motive couldn’t have been robbery, for all the money he had had in his pockets, and all the notes out of his wallet (a large sum), were scattered around him, as if he had made a last att
empt to buy his captors off, but couldn’t give them enough.

  THE PAMPAS CLUMP

  ‘But what is it you don’t like about the pampas clump?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s untidy for one thing,’ Thomas said. ‘It doesn’t grow evenly and always seems to need a haircut. A shrub should be symmetrical.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly a shrub.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. A shrub would be more self-controlled. It’s a sort of grass—and grass needs cutting. Besides, it’s all ages at once, some of it’s green, some sere, and some dead. And then its leaves break and dangle depressingly.’

  ‘But aren’t we all like that?’

  ‘Not so obviously. We are more of a piece. Anyone would know that you were forty-one, Fergus, and I was thirty-eight.’

  I flattered myself that I looked younger than Thomas; there was a deep line between his brows and his eyes behind his spectacles were tired and restless.

  ‘How old is the pampas?’

  ‘Oh, any age. It was here, you may remember, when I bought the house. I’ve often thought of getting rid of it. It’s so suburban. It doesn’t fit into an old garden, like this one is supposed to be.’

  ‘But if it’s old itself?’