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

He felt an unaccountable unwillingness to go to bed, and lingered on watching the dying fire. A fire made work; he oughtn’t to have it, really, now that he was without a daily woman: to-morrow he would tell Mrs. Weaver not to light it.

At last he dragged himself upstairs, but when he reached his bedroom he realized he had forgotten the oil of wintergreen. He must turn the lights on and go back and fetch it. Down he went through the quiet house. It was on the sideboard where Mrs. Weaver had left it, and even at a distance exhaled a strong whiff of her presence. Its own smell, when he took the cork out, was much more reassuring.

Remember the finger-tips . . . He rubbed gently along his neck, and as far round to the back as he could reach; Mrs. Weaver was right: it was easier for someone else to do it, but that someone had to be the right one, which she was not. He lengthened out the process, turning up the bottle, taking little nips, as if he was a wintergreen addict.

Now there was no excuse for these delaying tactics: he must get into bed. But before getting into bed, he must put back the bottle—put it back into the corner cupboard.

But why? Why not leave it on his dressing-table till the morning, when somebody else—Mrs. Weaver in fact—would put it back? He wasn’t mad about the corner cupboard and she was, or seemed to be: if he put it back he would deprive her of a pleasure. But he saw through his own cowardice, for cowardice it was; he mustn’t let it grow on him, mustn’t let neurosis grow on him, or soon he wouldn’t be able to do the simplest thing, not cross the street, perhaps, which was far more dangerous, even in the country, than putting a medicine-bottle back into its place.

When he was only a few feet from the cupboard he heard the sound of something dripping. Was it the tap from his wash-basin? But no, the tap was turned off. Back he came and saw, couldn’t help seeing, a dark pool like an inky sunburst on the bare boards below the cupboard. He stooped to touch it; his upturned finger came back red, not black.

A quotation, or perhaps a misquotation, from Landor stole into his mind: ‘Dost thou hear the blood drip, Dashka?’

The curtains were flung back, the stage appeared: rather the same scene as last time, but there were differences. Another bottle faced him, its neck broken and cracked down all its length. Through the crack the red cough-mixture oozed. The cotton-wool corpse, white dabbled with red, was not a woman’s but a man’s; elementary as the modelling was, the figure was faintly obscene. And the blade of the pocket-knife, instead of pointing at the vitals of the victim, was plunged into its neck. There was something else too, the explanation of which didn’t dawn on Philip at the time: a sliver of coarse yellowish paper, cut out of a telegram: severely wounded, it said.

Rage struggled with terror in Philip’s breast, but for the moment rage prevailed. Magic, indeed! He’d show her! He’d give her magic! But what, and how? His mind had never worked along those lines before. He looked up. On the top shelf lay the fat roll of cotton-wool in its flimsy wrapping of blue paper which he had intended as a barricade against the evil influences of the tortoiseshell. Had Mrs. Weaver, prying in the cupboard, moved it, and had the sight of what lay behind it touched her off? . . . She had plucked it like a goose: feathers of cottonwool were everywhere, mingled with thin shreds of blue paper. Philip followed suit, and soon had fashioned from the yielding medium the grotesque likeness of a female form. But what to do with it? Exactly what harm did he intend her? What kind of death were those implacable soldier-bottles to witness?

The doll’s house on the landing just outside his door possessed a kitchen, and the kitchen had a stove, a big old-fashioned thing with an oven-door that opened. He took the stove out and suddenly his evil purpose seemed to animate it, giving it the cold fascination of a lethal instrument. But he must clean the cupboard first, for no blood was to flow. He must shift the scene so that no competing image should weaken its effect. He worked with nailbrush, soap and towel—Mrs. Weaver kept her kitchen very clean. How much verisimilitude should he aim at? He wanted his tableau to be death-like, not life-like. Softly he closed the oven-door on the plump neck; the head was well inside; the arms and legs and trunk sprawled outwards. His horror of himself increased almost to faintness; through the salutary odours of the medicine-cupboard he thought he could detect a whiff of gas. And there must be one, there must be. He turned his bedroom gas-fire on, and listened to the exciting continuous susurration of escaping gas. Death could breathe out without ever breathing in. But he could not, and it was to escape himself and his own fate, not to hasten Mrs. Weaver’s that he turned the tap off and lurched out of the room.

In which of the outhouses he spent the night he never knew. But it gave him a sense of security so profound that under it he slept and slept and slept. Only by degrees, as he was crossing the courtyard in the broad daylight, did memory of the night before return to him, and then only as shapes and colours of feeling, not as facts. But by the time he reached his door he had more or less reconstructed the story. It horrified him; the future yawned at his feet.

Hardly had he got into bed and kicked out his cold hot-water bottle when there came a knock at the door and Mrs. Weaver entered, bringing his morning tea. She drew the curtains and, without being asked, handed him his bed-jacket.

‘How is your neck this morning, sir?’ she inquired.

Philip turned his head. It hurt him very much, which was strange, for he had felt nothing of it for ten hours.

‘Not much better, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘You should have let me rub it, sir. My husband——’

‘Ah, how good you were to him,’ said Philip. ‘And yet he died in the end, poor fellow.’

She made no answer but sniffed the air and said,

‘There’s a slight smell of gas in here. Shall I open the window wider?’

‘Do.’

‘I always think gas is dangerous,’ she went on. ‘And so I’m afraid I must give in my notice.’

‘Oh, Mrs. Weaver!’

‘Yes, I must leave to-day, and I’ll forgo my wages. I had a dreadful dream.’

‘Oh, what?’

‘That I was being gassed. That I had put my head in a gas-oven. What could have made me dream that?’

‘What indeed? But dreams go by contraries, you know,’ said Philip.

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Mrs. Weaver, pensively. ‘I’m not so sure. I’ve ordered the taxi for ten o’clock. I will cook your breakfast.’

On an impulse Philip jumped out of bed. His foot struck against something hard—it was a skewer, a meat skewer.

‘Mrs. Weaver,’ he called after her, ‘you’ve forgotten something.’

When she came back he handed her the skewer.

‘A skewer?’ she said. ‘However did that get here?’ It dropped from her fingers and lay between them, pointing, he was glad to see, in her direction. She stooped to pick it up.

‘No, leave it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it. And there are two things you can do for me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘First, would you telephone to Shuttleworth Hospital and ask how Mrs. Featherstone is?’

She came back with her neutral face, and said that Mrs. Featherstone had taken a turn for the better.

‘And now would you kindly put the bottle of wintergreen back into the medicine-cupboard?’

From the bed he watched her open the bow-fronted doors. One glance showed him that all his magic apparatus of the night had been dismantled.

‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Do you know who tidied up the medicine-cupboard?’

‘No, sir,’ she said, and closed the door behind her. Fingering the meat skewer, which was long, thin, sharp and crowned by the traditional crook, Philip almost, but not quite, believed her.