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

‘No one does so much harm as those who go about doing good,’ I said, quoting Bishop Creighton.

‘You never run that risk,’ he retorted tartly.

‘Well, not on this occasion, perhaps,’ I answered, ‘and I warned you not to.’ Realizing we were on the verge of a quarrel, and I might get no more out of him, I succeeded in pacifying him: few things make one angrier with other people than being angry with oneself.

He had been playing bridge with Edward and seen the face appearing on the bridge-marker. He made no comment at the time, but when Edward was giving him a lift home he plucked up courage and said he had seen a girl whose face reminded him of the face Edward had been drawing—he didn’t say it reminded him of Mary, and now I come to think of it, I don’t believe any of Edward’s friends had ever remarked to him on the resemblance, though they often spoke of it to each other. Edward asked him where he had seen her, and Thomas Henry told him, but couldn’t tell him her name because I had forgotten it.

‘You didn’t tell him that?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. I left you out of it, as I promised to.’

Then Thomas Henry asked if he would be interested in seeing her, and Edward said he wasn’t sure; he said the drawings were a vice which he had given up when he was married. He said this in quite an ordinary tone and changed the subject. But when he next saw Thomas Henry he told him he had been down to Restbourne.

‘Oh!’ I said.

‘Yes, but the bird had flown. There was no one in the café in the least resembling her. He went to Restbourne three Saturdays running, and twice in the middle of the week, making some excuse of going on business—five times altogether, but he never saw her.’

‘She might have been away on holiday,’ I said, ‘on those three Saturdays. It’s August.’

‘I suggested that,’ said Thomas Henry, ‘and he’s going to try again. He would have asked about her, but he couldn’t, not knowing her name.’

‘Did he seem upset?’ I asked.

‘He certainly couldn’t talk of anything else.’

‘Look what you’ve done, Thomas Henry! You can’t say you weren’t warned.’

‘No, but it may have given him an object in life. He was much more animated than he used to be.’

The next time we met, Thomas Henry was less optimistic. ‘He’s been down there again,’ he said, without bothering to explain who ‘he’ was, ‘and she isn’t there. He told me he thought I’d made a mistake, because he wasn’t a good draughtsman, and what he drew corresponded to something inside him, not outside (he didn’t mention Mary). He said that each line had a special meaning for him, and any deviation from it, in a human face, made that face quite unlike the face of his conception. And yet he couldn’t help thinking that I might be right, and that one day she might come back, and he would find her. “She may be ill,” he said, “or one of her relations may be ill. In the working-classes, some relation or other is nearly always ill”—you know the way he talks about the working-classes, as if they were another type of human being.’

‘They are,’ I said.

‘Oh, nonsense. But I do think we should do something for him—he can’t go on like this, commuting between here and Restbourne like a . . . like a . . .’

‘Shuttle on a loom,’ I said. ‘Well, you do something, Thomas Henry, it’s your pigeon. Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’

‘Yes, I felt for him more than you did. I saw a fellow creature suffering, and wanted to relieve him. Whereas you——’

‘Passed by on the other side.’

‘It’s nothing to be proud of. But now you can do something to rid him of his obsession. You can go down to Restbourne, Ernest, and find out what’s happened to her.’

‘Why not you? I’m not specially keen on the south coast in August.’

‘Because you talked to her, and made yourself conspicuous, as no doubt they all remember in the café. You might even pose as a relation.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘One of the sick ones, perhaps.’

‘Oh, do go, Ernest. You’re a man of independent means. It’s much easier for you. You don’t have to be in any special place at any special time, so why not go to Restbourne?’

‘Restbourne is the last place I want to go to,’ I replied. But in the end I went.

The appalling vulgarity of that town! Nowhere has the proletarianization of the English race gone so fast, or so far, as it has at Restbourne. It is the apotheosis of the synthetic. I dreaded it, and when I got there it was worse than I remembered—an exhibition of what was, to my middle-class mind, a substitute for every form of pleasure. Not that it was not expensive, for it was; everyone seemed to have money to burn. But how joyless that sometimes gay proceeding made them! How they trailed about on the sea-front, well fed, well dressed (so far as they were dressed), well tanned, well oiled (sometimes in both senses of the word), but among the lot not one whom a photographer, still less a biographer, would ever want to make his subject.

It was a relief to sit down in the Krazie Café, for a chair is a chair, and tiredness is tiredness, whatever a mass-produced consciousness may have done to take the reality out of most objects and sensations. She wasn’t there, Doris Blackmore wasn’t there: I saw that at a glance; and the full weight of five hours thrown away, and five pounds thrown away on railway-trains and taxis, fell on me so crushingly that I groaned aloud. And sharpening my general disappointment was a particular one which I couldn’t or wouldn’t account for then. Deep down in me I had hoped to see the waitress. Why? To bandy words with her? To let her know where she got off, or didn’t get off? I couldn’t tell. But my sense of grievance was so overwhelming and acute that I did what, coming down in the train, I hadn’t thought possible—for me, at any rate. With a clear conscience, which for some reason mine wasn’t, it should have been quite easy; just a few words, casually uttered, as if the inquiry was the most natural in the world, and the thing would have been done. But in the train, however often I rehearsed them, whatever accent of indifference I gave them, they would not pass my lips. Now I knew they would, and when I had paid my bill I went up to the woman who seemed to be in charge and said:

‘Can you tell me what’s become of the waitress, Doris Blackmore I think her name was, who used to be here?’

At that the woman’s face stiffened and she said shortly:

‘I’m afraid I can’t. She left us at a few days’ notice. Naturally, we did not pay her her week’s wages.’

‘How long ago was that?’

‘Over a month, I think. She said she was fed up, and she was earning good money, too. They’re all alike—you can’t rely on them. A whim, a fancied slight, a boy, you never know what it is, and then they’re off.’

‘A pity,’ I said. ‘She seemed to be a nice girl.’

The manageress pursed her lips and shrugged.

‘No nicer than the rest. They’re spoilt, if you ask me.’

‘And you don’t know where she’s gone?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.’

Well, that was that. My next step was to tell Thomas Henry (who was going to pretend that he had made the journey down to Restbourne) to tell Edward that the Face had been, well, effaced. Useless to look for it; better forget about it. And this he did, assuring Edward, who didn’t want to be convinced, that any further raids on Restbourne would be fruitless. Fruitless for me, too, I reflected. The incident rankled like a sore place that hurts and is desired, as Cleopatra said, not only for its own sake but for the contrast with the healthy tissues round it.

At that time I had a flat in Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park and it was my nightly custom, for the sake of my health, to take a brisk constitutional in the Park before retiring. Between Hyde Park Corner and Wellington Barracks was my usual beat, but it was not only my beat, I shared it with a great many others who were not there for their health. Some sat, some stood, some walked, some drove up or drove away in motor-cars that seemed to hug the kerbstone in a peculiarly intimate manner and in some way—perhaps by exuding a moral cloud—to darken the surrounding air. I won’t say anything against them for fear I should offend the live-and-let-live spirit of high-minded persons; but walking by them I had to run a gauntlet of hullos, dearies, darlings, and other forms of affectionate solicitation, and I got very tired of it. Indeed, but for a certain obstinacy, and the feeling that the Park was mine as well as theirs, I should have bent my steps another way.