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

I couldn’t get much out of Nesta. She rather avoided me, and for the first time in my life I felt like a policeman who must be treated with reserve in case he finds out too much. I still persuaded myself that Victor Chisholm had been and had not been in the library in the early hours of Saturday morning: if pressed, I should have said he had been. The third possibility, put forward by Nesta, that another guest had been searching for a book, I dismissed. My theory was that Nesta had a superstitious dread of a fire breaking out at Monkshood Manor and was keeping Victor in ignorance while she availed herself of his services as a night-watchman without warning him of the risk he ran.

Risk? There was no risk: yet I vaguely felt that I ought to do something about it, so I tried to make my social prevail over my private conscience and throw myself into the collective life of a week-end party. I thought about the form my coming Collins would take, and wondered if I ought to apologize for being a dull guest. In the meantime I could search Nesta out and make amends for something that I felt had been slightly critical in my attitude towards her.

My quest took me to the library. Nesta was not there but someone was—a housemaid on her hands and knees working vigorously at the carpet with a dust-pan and brush.

‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed, surprised into speech by the sight of such antiquated cleaning methods; ‘haven’t you got a vacuum cleaner?’

The maid, who was pretty, looked up and said:

‘Yes, but it won’t bring these marks out.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘What sort of marks are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the maid. ‘But they look like footmarks.’

I bent down: they did look like footmarks, but they had another peculiarity which for some reason I refrained from commenting on. Instead I said, glancing at the fireplace:

‘It looks as though someone had been paddling in the ashes.’

‘That’s what I think,’ she said, leaning back to study the marks on the carpet.

‘Well, it’s clean dirt,’ I observed, ‘and should come off all right.’

‘Yes, it should,’ she agreed. ‘But it doesn’t. It’s my belief that it’s been burnt in.’

‘Oh no!’ I assured her, but curiosity overcame me, and I, too, got down on my hands and knees, and buried my nose in the carpet.

‘Hugo, what are you doing?’ said Nesta’s voice behind me.

I jumped up guiltily.

‘What were you doing?’ she repeated almost sternly.

I had an inspiration.

‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘I wanted to know whether this lovely Persian carpet had been dyed with an aniline dye. There’s only one way to tell, you know—by licking it. Aniline tastes sour.’

‘And does it?’ asked Nesta.

‘Not in the least.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Nesta, and leading me from the room she began to tell me the history of the carpet. This gave me an opportunity to praise the house and all its appointments.

‘What treasures you have, Nesta,’ I wound up. ‘I hope they are fully insured.’

‘Yes, they are,’ she answered, rather dryly. ‘But I didn’t know you were an expert on carpets, Hugo.’

As soon as I could I returned to the library. The maid had done her work well: hardly a trace of the footmarks remained, and the smell of burning, which I thought I had detected, clinging to them, had quite worn off. You could still see the track they made, away from the fireplace towards the door: but they didn’t reach the door or go in a direct line for it; they stopped at a point halfway between, against the inner wall, which was sheathed in books. There was nothing surprising in that: after a few steps the ashes would have been all rubbed off.

And there was another thing I couldn’t see, and almost wondered if I had seen it—the mark of the big toe, which showed that the feet had been bare. Victor might have come down in his bare feet, to avoid making a noise; but it was odd, all the same, if not as odd as I had first thought it.

In the afternoon we went a long motor drive in two cars to have tea with a neighbour. As soon as Monkshood Manor was out of sight its problems began to fade, and in the confusion of the two parties joining forces round the tea-table they seemed quite unreal. And even when the house came into view again, stretched cat-like beyond the lawn, I only felt a twinge of my former uneasiness. By Sunday evening a week-end visit seems almost over; the threads with one’s temporary residence are snapping; mentally one is already in next week. Before I got into bed I took out my diary and checked up my engagements. They were quite ordinary engagements for luncheon and dinner and so on, but suddenly they seemed extraordinarily desirable. I fixed my mind on them and went to sleep thinking about them.

I even dreamed about them, or one of them. It started as an ordinary dinner party but one of the guests was late and we had to wait for him. ‘Who is he?’ someone asked, and our host answered, ‘I don’t know, he will tell us when he comes.’ Everyone seemed to accept this answer as reasonable and satisfactory, and we hung about talking and sipping cocktails until our host said, ‘I don’t think he can be coming after all. We won’t wait any longer.’ But just as we were sitting down to dinner there was a knock at the door and a voice said, ‘May I come in?’ And then I saw that we weren’t at my friend’s house in London, but back again at Monkshood, and the door that was opening was the library door, which was lined with bindings to make it look like bookshelves. For some reason it wasn’t at the end of the wall but in the middle; and I said, ‘Why is he coming in by that door?’ ‘Because it’s the door he used to use,’ somebody answered. The door was a long time opening, and it seemed to be opening by itself with nobody behind it; then came a hand and a sleeve—and a figure wearing a monk’s cowl.

I woke with a start and was at once aware of a strong smell. For a moment I thought it was the smell of cooking, and wondered if it could be breakfast-time. If so, the cook had burnt something, for there was a smell of burning too. But it couldn’t be breakfast time for not a glimmer of light showed round the window curtains. Actually, as I discovered when I turned on my bedside lamp, it was half-past two—the same hour that I had chosen for my sortie two nights before.

The smell seemed to be growing fainter, and I wondered if it could be an illusion, an effect of auto-suggestion. I opened the door and put my head into the passage and as quickly withdrew it. Not only because the smell was stronger there, but for another reason. The passage was not in darkness, as it had been the other night, for the hall lights had been turned on.

Well, let Victor see to it, I thought, whatever it is; no doubt he’s on the prowl: let his be the glory. But curiosity overcame me and I changed my mind.

In the hall the smell was stronger. It seemed to come in waves, but where did it come from? My steps took me to the library. The door was open. A flickering light came through, and a smell strong enough to make my throat smart and my eyes water. I lingered, putting off the moment of going in: then I remembered the fire buckets in the hall and ran back for one. The water had a thick film of dust over it and I had an irrational feeling that it would be less effective so, and that I ought to change it. I did not do so, however, but hurried back and somehow forced myself to go into the room.

There were shadows, of course, and there was smoke, drifting about as smoke does. The two together make a shape that is almost opaque. And the shape was opaque that I saw before I saw anything else, a shape that seemed to rise from its knees beside the fireplace and glide slantwise across my vision towards the inner wall of the library. I might not have noticed it so particularly had it not recalled to me the shape of the latecomer in my dream. Before I could ask myself what it was, or meant, it had disappeared, chased perhaps from my attention by the obligation to act. I had the bucket: where should I begin? The dark mass of the big round library table was between me and the fireplace; beyond it should have been the card-table, but that I could not see. Except on the hearth no flames were visible.