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

‘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.

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?’