Leslie Hartley - The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

His mind had travelled far before the assistant returned, bearing an immense square box which he respectfully tendered to Timothy. How solid beauty was! Clasping it, almost eclipsed by it, Timothy moved towards the door. Another customer had come in; another vase was being displayed; and as Timothy passed by he heard Mr. Joshaghan say ‘There are two thousand million people in the world, Mr. Gainfoot and not one of them——’

But Timothy did not care, for before him, like a buckler against all those millions, he was carrying the Absolute.

Henry Tarrant had been asked to write a short story but he couldn’t think of one.

He tried all sorts of devices. He studied the ornaments in his room (and they were many, for he was an inveterate collector); he recalled the circumstances in which he had inherited or acquired them. How many good stories had been written about objects!— The Tinder Box , Le Peau de Chagrin , The Golden Bowl . But his had nothing to tell him. They had risen above context, they were complete in themselves, they did not want to be questioned about their pasts.

Well, what about Nature? Many admirable stories had been written about Nature. Was not the sea the chief character in most of Conrad’s novels? Did not the moors dominate The Return of the Native ? Could Green Mansions have been written without trees?

Henry Tarrant knew about Nature, of course. Nature had made discreet appearances in his novels. He knew when flowers came out; he would never have committed Emily Brontë’s blunder of making wallflowers blossom in September. But Nature had always come to him in his study. He did not have to go out in search of it, it was there when he took out his botany book. And if he wanted a more direct view he had only to go to his window, which commanded both the moors and the sea. What was Nature doing? He looked out. A September drizzle shrouded moors and sea, reducing the one to a pinkish, the other to a greyish monochrome. So much for Nature. He turned back with relief to his well-ordered room.

The date for the delivery of the story drew nearer, but Henry was no nearer to writing it. Art had failed him, Nature had failed him; they would not dramatize themselves in his mind.

There remained the human race. At the thought of the human race Henry’s face, could he have seen it, lengthened. As a novelist he had written a lot about the human race, of course; he had even been complimented on his knowledge of it. And he did, he felt, know a lot about it, quite enough, too much. Sitting in his study he had paraded it before him. The human race had its apologists but Henry Tarrant was not among them. He was not going to say smooth things about it. It was a wonder that his public went on reading him, but from a sort of masochism, which was one of their less endearing traits, they did. They took their medicine and came back for more. Surely it should be easy to pour out another little dose?

Henry Tarrant was a bachelor and fiction-writing had confirmed him in the single state. The more he wrote about human beings the less he wanted to have anything to do with them. He had got them where he wanted them, and that was outside. Outside, they obeyed the rules—his rules. Critics had remarked on his aloofness, but it was perfectly in order for an artist to be aloof. A portrait-painter does not embrace his subject, at least he is under no obligation to; he stands away from it at whatever distance he finds convenient—in Henry’s case, the range of a good pair of field glasses. But when he peered into the distance, once so thickly populated with unprepossessing figures, he could see nothing.

An idea came into his mind. ‘I must provoke an incident,’ he thought; ‘I must provoke an incident.’ He did not know where the words came from—perhaps they were an echo from some old newspaper. Dictators provoked incidents. But his whole life—nearly forty years of it now—had been designed to keep incidents at bay. He had kept illness at bay, the war at bay, marriage at bay: he had kept life itself at bay. Only art had he welcomed; and now art had gone back on him.

So how could he provoke an incident—ridiculous phrase? He looked round the snug little room. The only incidents that ever occurred in it were breakages. Sometimes he broke a thing himself and then his housekeeper would say: ‘Well, sir, I’m glad it was you did it,’ and this annoyed him, but it did not constitute an incident in the literary sense. One cannot provoke an incident with oneself.

In a panic he snatched up his hat, mackintosh and stick and hurried out. A sense of dislocated routine oppressed him, as if he was wearing someone else’s clothes. The hour, six-thirty, was sacred to literary effort. The warm wet autumnal twilight wrapped him round. Which way? It didn’t matter which way; he chose the road between occasional bungalows that led towards the golf house. Suddenly he saw a dog was following him. He didn’t like dogs. ‘Go away!’ he said. But the animal wouldn’t go away: it trotted beside him with a proprietary air as if it had adopted him.

Presently it halted. ‘Good,’ thought Henry, and walked on, thankful to be relieved of this encumbrance. Then he saw, some way ahead, a lady also with a dog: she must be giving it an airing. He heard a scamper; the yellow dog tore past him and bore down on the lady’s dog. There was a moment’s parley between the two; then a scuffle; then the indescribable ear-piercing uproar of a dog fight.

‘Call off your dog, please, call off your dog!’ the lady shouted.

‘It isn’t my dog!’ Henry Tarrant replied.

‘Well, please do something,’ cried the lady, ‘or my dog will get murdered.’ She had no stick or whip, only a lead with which she was vainly thrashing the aggressor’s back.

No pepper-pot, no bucket of water. Henry paused a moment, then plunged into the mêlée of gleaming eyes and snapping teeth.

The yellow dog had got the spaniel down and was literally wiping the floor with it; the blows of Henry’s stick went off its back like water. Leaning down he seized it by the collar and lifted it into the air. It released the spaniel, wriggled round, and bit him to the bone. ‘Ow!’ he exclaimed and dropped the dog, which darted off into the gloom like the yellow streak it was.

Tall, dark and soft-featured, the lady bent over her pet. ‘Poor Sherry! Poor Sherry!’ she panted. The spaniel struggled to its feet and took some trial steps. She hadn’t noticed Henry’s hand. Better not tell her: let the incident be closed. But then she saw the blood flowing.

‘Oh, your poor hand!’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Henry, rather ungraciously.

‘But it is! You must put something on it at once. Have you anyone to do it for you?’

‘Well, no,’ said Henry, which was not quite true.

‘Then may I?’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Henry in a distant voice.

‘It’s the least I can do,’ the lady said. ‘Do you live near here?’

Unwillingly Henry pointed to his house.

‘Oh, then you’re Henry Tarrant—how exciting!’

But Henry didn’t ask the lady her name.

Later she said to him across the reassuring fumes of Dettol:

‘But I thought you never saw anyone!’

‘I don’t,’ said Henry, self-consciously.

‘But,’ she exclaimed inconsequently, ‘it’s such a pretty house!’

Henry Tarrant grunted. The basin was running with blood; the bathroom floor was splashed with blood; the towel was blood-stained. Blood everywhere: his blood. He felt absurdly proud of it. But the lady, following his eyes, suddenly realized the damage she had done, and was appalled. First she had wounded a writer and then wrecked his house. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘how you must wish you had never met us!’