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

Directly I felt something give, I pulled my foot out, and the lid came down and the bath sank through the floor like a coffin at a cremation service. Goodness, how frightened I was! I heard the click as the bath touched bottom; but I couldn’t see it down the shaft. Then I heard rumbling again, and saw the bath-lid coming up. But I did not risk getting in, not I.

‘Coo-ee!’

I jumped. It sounded close beside me. I moved into another temenos, trying to pretend that I was looking for Vayne. Really it would serve him right if I gave him away to Fairclough. He had no business to frighten people like that.

‘Coo-ee!’

Right over on Fairclough’s side, now. But it sounded somehow different; was it an owl? It might not be very easy to find Fairclough; there must be half a hundred of these blasted temene, and the moon was hidden by clouds. He might go out through one opening just as I was entering by another, and so we might go on all night. Thank goodness the night was warm. But what a silly farce it was.

I could just see to read my watch. Another quarter of an hour to go. Fairclough must be getting jumpy. I’ll go and find him, I thought, and put him wise about the figure. Vayne would never know. Or would he? One couldn’t tell where he was, he might be in the next temenos, watching me through a hole.

A light mist was descending, which obscured the heads of such statues as I could see projecting above the high walls of the temene. If it grew thicker, I might not see Fairclough even if he were close to me, and we might wander about till Doomsday—at least, for another ten minutes, which seemed just as long to wait.

I looked down, and saw that my feet had left tracks, dark patches in the wet grass. They seemed to lead in all directions. But were they all mine? Had I really walked about as much as that? I tried to identify the footprints and see if they tallied.

‘Coo-ee!’

That almost certainly was an owl; the sound seemed to come from above. But perhaps Vayne added ventriloquism to his other accomplishments. He was capable of anything. Not a man one could trust. Postgate hadn’t trusted him—not, at least, as the chairman of the company.

It was my duty, I now felt, to warn Fairclough. And I should be quite glad to see him myself, quite glad. But where was he?

I found myself running from one temenos to another and getting back to the one I started from. I could tell by the figure: at least that didn’t move. I started off again. Steady, steady. Here was a temenos with no footprints on it—a virgin temenos. I crossed it and found myself in the central circle. I crossed that too.

Now I was in Fairclough’s preserves. Poor Fairclough! To judge by the footprints, he had been running round even more than I had. But were they all his? Here was the figure of Pan—the god of panic. Very appropriate.

‘Fairclough! Fairclough!’ I began to call as loudly as I dared having nearly but not quite lost my head.

‘Fairclough! Fairclough!’ I couldn’t bring myself to hug the walls; the shadows were too thick; I stuck to the middle of each space.

I suppose I was expecting to find him, and yet when I heard him answer ‘Here!’ I nearly jumped out of my skin. He was crouching against a hedge. He evidently had the opposite idea from mine; he felt the hedge was a protection; and I had some difficulty in persuading him to come out into the open.

‘Listen!’ I whispered. “What you’ve got to do is——’

‘But I’ve seen him,’ Fairclough said. ‘There’s his footmark.’

I looked: the footmark was long and slurred, quite unlike his or mine.

‘If you were sure it was him,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you speak to him?’

‘I did,’ said Fairclough, ‘but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn round.’

‘Someone may have got into the garden,’ I said, ‘some third person. But we’ll find out. I’ll take you to the statue.’

‘The statue?’

‘I’ll explain afterwards.’

I had regained my confidence, but could not remember in which direction Vayne’s statue lay.

Suddenly I had an idea.

‘We’ll follow the footprints.’

‘Which?’ asked Fairclough.

‘Well, the other person’s.’

Easy to say; easy to distinguish them from ours; but which way were they pointing? That was the question.

‘He walks on his heels,’ I said. ‘It’s this way.’

‘We followed and reached the temenos where the statue had stood. No possibility of mistake. We saw the patches of dead grass where its feet had been; we saw the footprints leading away from them. But the statue was not there.

‘Vayne!’ I shouted. ‘Vayne!’

‘Coo-ee!’ came a distant call.

‘To the steps,’ I cried. ‘To the steps! Let’s go together!’

Vayne was standing on the terrace steps: I saw him plainly; and I also saw the figure that was stalking him: the other Vayne. Two Vaynes. Vayne our host, the shorter of the two, stood lordly, confident, triumphing over the night. ‘Coo-ee!’ he hooted to his moonlit acres. ‘Coo-ee!’ But the other Vayne had crept up the grass slope and was crouching at his back.

For a moment the two figures stood one behind the other, motionless as cats. Then a scream rang out; there was a whirl of limbs, like the Manxman’s wheel revolving; a savage snarl, a headlong fall, a crash. Both fell, both Vaynes. “When the thuds of their descent were over, silence reigned.

They were lying in a heap together, a tangled heap of men and plaster. A ceiling might have fallen on them, yet it was not a ceiling; it was almost a third man, for the plaster fragments still bore a human shape. Both Vaynes were dead but one of them, we learned afterwards, had been dead for a long time. And this Vayne was not Vayne at all, but Postgate.

‘He’s a strange man,’ said Nesta.

‘Strange in what way?’ I asked.

‘Oh, just neurotic. He has a fire-complex or something of the kind. He lies awake at night thinking that a spark may have jumped through the fireguard and set the carpet alight. Then he has to get up and go down to look. Sometimes he does this several times a night, even after the fire has gone out.’

‘Does he keep an open fire in his own house?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he does, because it’s healthier, and other people like it, and he doesn’t want to give way to himself about it.’

‘He sounds a man of principle,’ I observed.

‘He is,’ my hostess said. ‘I think that’s half the trouble with Victor. If he would let himself go more he wouldn’t have these fancies. They are his sub-conscious mind punishing him, he says, by making him do what he doesn’t want to. But somebody has told him that if he could embrace his neurosis and really enjoy it——’

I laughed.

‘I don’t mean in that way,’ said Nesta severely. ‘What a mind you have, Hugo! And he conscientiously tries to. As if anyone could enjoy leaving a nice warm bed and creeping down cold passages to look after a fire that you pretty well know is out!’

‘Are you sure that it is a fire he looks at?’ I asked. ‘I can think of another reason for creeping down a cold passage and embracing what lies at the end of it.’

Nesta ignored this.

‘It’s not only fires,’ she said, ‘it’s gas taps, electric light switches, anything that he thinks might start a blaze.’

‘But seriously, Nesta,’ I said, ‘there might be some method in his madness. It gives him an alibi for all sorts of things besides love-making: theft, for instance, or murder.’

‘You say that because you don’t know Victor,’ Nesta said. ‘He’s almost a Buddhist—he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Does he want people to know about his peculiarity?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s told you——’