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

I couldn’t answer, and the voice went on, ‘I’ll tell you why you have turned against me—it’s for the same reason that you took to me. You fell in love with me and now you’ve fallen in love with them—that couple that were here a moment ago. You’d never set eyes on them before but they took your fancy, just as I did, and you thought: “I can identify myself with them! Their youth shall be my youth, their happiness my happiness, their children my children, their future mine!” Yes, grey-haired Mr. Minchin, you thought you could renew yourself in them, and lead vicariously the life you never led! But I’m not so fickle! I don’t want them and their squalling children, who will deafen me with their clamour and never listen to my voice as you did, till they came. I don’t want them, I tell you, and what’s more, I won’t have them!’

The voice of jealousy, no doubt, piercing what seemed a lifetime of sad, conflicting thoughts; but I had to heed it, for I could feel the house’s enmity like a cold air at my back, feel too the threat of imminent and lasting rupture that a quarrel with an old friend brings. I tried to stop my ears but still the voice droned on, painting my future life away from Paradise Paddock in hues as dark as my own thoughts, as dark as the shadows gathering on the river, where a patch of light under the low branches might have been a swan. And not only my future, but the house’s too. For the Marchmonts wouldn’t keep it, the voice told me. Was it likely that a whim, born of being in love, fostered by a fine evening and stimulated by two dry martinis (dry, mind you) for the river, would last ? With the servant difficulty, and all those flights of stairs? Oh, no, mark my words, within a year, Paradise Paddock will again be on the market, and what then? A road-house, will it be, with the river-bank a lido? Or an old people’s home, an eventide home—fast falls the eventide! Or gutted and converted into flats—homes for the homeless, but not a home for you, you will have no home. That precious word will have no meaning for you. You have given your home up to the Marchmonts.

It was then I heard the beating of the swan’s wings, a unique sound, there is nothing like it, an aspirated gasping, as if the atmosphere itself was labouring to keep that mighty body airborne, fourteen pounds of bone and flesh and fathers, the heaviest living thing that flies. It chilled my blood, for to me it was the prelude to attack, the throbbing drone of the bombers before they loosed their bombs. I could see nothing on the shrouded river, but in my mind’s eye I could see it all—the long white wings skimming towards me, and between them the bottle-shaped fuselage of body tapering to the arrowy neck and head—and, the next moment, crisis!—the necessity to think and act only in self-defence, to lose myself in anger, in mindless hostility, just as it, the swan, had.

But of course it wasn’t me the bird was after: I was on dry land, out of harm’s way. Its quarry now would be another swan—had been, perhaps, for this swan was a killer. Two or three times I’d seen a drifting body, its neck once white gnawed bare by rats or fishes. And when I reported this to the Inspector of the R.S.P.C.A., hoping to enlist his aid against the river tyrant, he only said, ‘Yes, swans are like that.’

All this went through my mind, was driven into it by those powerful wing-beats, as if by a hammer.

When, a few seconds later, the sound ceased, the air was unburdened of its urgency, and so was I; I got up as easily as if no panic spell had bound me, and took a turn along the terrace. I was my own master again and the house beside me as sightless and as speechless as any other house. A respite, but only for a moment, and then I must decide, say yes or no, and not on grounds of sentiment or fantasy. Could I afford to keep the house? Not as it should be kept. Could the Marchmonts? Apparently they could. Should I find a buyer with more feeling for it and its genius loci (how that creature had bullied me!) than they had? No, I shouldn’t. Then wasn’t it more sensible to close with an offer which might not be repeated?

The answer must be yes.

I turned to my table on the terrace with my mind made up. Ignoring the foolscap that glimmered at me I let my elbows slide along the table and in a moment—I suppose it was the release from indecision—the darkness pressed down on my eyes and took me into it.

I dreamed and it was a dark dream, for the house was dark. I entered through the study door, but nowhere could I find the switch, and when at last I found it, it didn’t work. This seemed to reinforce the darkness; I dared not move for fear of falling over something, and then I knew the house was hostile to me, something or someone didn’t want me to come in. I was an outsider, but I couldn’t get out any more than I could get in, for I couldn’t tell where the door was. Where was I? If indoors, why did branches scrape against me? And what were these white flashes whirling round me, that clove the air like feathered scimitars? I tried to cry out but instead of my own voice I heard another, a jagged line of sound that struck against my ear and seemed to call my name. ‘Mr. Minchin! Mr. Minchin!’ The thin wail rose and fell. ‘Remember to say yes,’ I told myself. ‘Yes is what you want and what they want. Yes, yes, yes, yes’—I was still saying it when I reached the river wall.

The sounds had stopped by then. Who knew how long the Marchmonts had been calling? Perhaps a long time; perhaps, getting no reply, they had given me up and were making tracks for Warmwell.

No, they were there, at least two people were who surely must be they—my visitors of who knew how long ago? My mind told me that they must be, though my eyes denied it, denied that this drenched couple in clothes no longer white but water-grey and so transparent that the skin showed through them, could be the Marchmonts. But their clothes were more recognizable than they were, for not a look I could remember, and hardly any awareness of themselves, each other, or of me, showed in their faces. The water in the canoe seemed to worry them, it was ankle-deep and they could not keep their feet still.

‘You’ve had a spill,’ I said. ‘Come in and let me find you some dry clothes.’

Neither of them answered for a moment or two: Mrs. Marchmont was the first to find her tongue.

‘No, thank you, we’ll go on. We’re not cold really. We shall be dry by the time we get to Warmwell. We stopped here because . . . Why did we stop, Harry?’

‘Because we said we would,’ he answered in a voice of which the inflexions were quite out of his control. ‘Mr. . . . Mr. . . . was going to tell us something.’

‘Look, you’ve had a shock,’ I said, ‘a nasty experience. Do come in and I’ll give you something to warm you,’

‘We did have a nasty experience,’ he said in his lilting sing-song. ‘That’s why we . . . don’t want to stay. That damned bird . . . it set about us——’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I was afraid so.’

‘It got us in the water where the banks were high. I didn’t think we could climb out, with it thrashing around. It got on to her back, the great big bugger, and would have drowned her, but I was on the bank by that time and I bashed it. . . with the paddle, you know.’

‘Did you kill it?’ I asked.

‘I think so. Do you see her dress, how torn it is, and her skin, all in ribbons. We’ll have to see a doctor.’

I looked, and looked away.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but do stay now. I’ll call a doctor, if you like.’

He shook his head. ‘We don’t think the place is healthy for us, and we’d better be off, thanks all the same. And thanks for the drinks, too—what a big drink we nearly had! And thanks for everything. Now there was something we were going to tell you, or you were going to tell us, that’s why we stopped. For the life of me, I can’t think what it was.’