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

Alas, he had reckoned without the current, swollen by recent rains, and he found that far from his towing the boat back to the boat-house, it was towing him down-river to the weir, where who knew what might not happen?

He at once relinquished the boat to its fate and after a struggle—for he was too old for this sort of thing—he reached the boat-house, the only possible landing-place, for everywhere else the banks were too high and steep, and he went dripping up to his bedroom.

It so happened that this very day he had engaged a new factotum, who was to cook and drive for him. His job with Philip was his first job of this kind—he had had others—and it was his first night in Philip’s house. His room faced Philip’s, an arrangement Philip was glad of, for being an elderly hypochondriac, he liked to have someone within call.

Nothing came of the river-episode—no pneumonia, no bronchitis—not at least for the moment—but who could tell? And suddenly he wondered if the house, which had seemed so welcoming and friendly over twenty years, had something against him?

The next morning, when the new factotum called him at eight o’clock with a pot of tea, he asked, just as a routine inquiry.

‘How did you sleep last night, Alfred?’

‘Oh,’ said Alfred who, like so many gentlemen’s gentlemen, when they still exist, had been in the Services, ‘I didn’t sleep a wink, sir.’ He sounded quite cheerful.

Philip, who himself suffered from insomnia, was distressed.

‘I hope your bed was comfortable?’

‘Oh yes, sir, couldn’t have been more comfortable.’

‘I’m glad of that. But perhaps you are one of the people—I am one myself—who don’t sleep well in a strange bed?’

‘Oh no, sir, I sleep like a log. I could sleep anywhere, on a clothes-line with a marlin-spike for a pillow.’

Philip didn’t know what a marlin-spike was, but as an aid to rest it didn’t sound very helpful.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, baffled. ‘Then what was it that kept you awake?’

‘It was the noises, sir.’

Philip sat up in bed and automatically began to listen for noises but there were none. One side of the house faced the main road where there was plenty of noise by day, and some by night; the other side, on which his bedroom lay, overlooked the long broad meadow, skirted, at no great distance, by the main railway line from London. Philip, in his sleepless hours, was used to the passing of nocturnal trains: indeed they soothed him rather than otherwise. There was the one-fifty, the two-twenty, and the three-forty-five; he didn’t resent them, he rather welcomed them, as establishing his identity with the outside world.

Alfred was standing by his bed, tea-pot in hand.

‘Shall I pour out for you, sir?’

‘Yes, please, Alfred. But what did you mean by noises?’

Alfred began to pour the tea into his cup.

‘Oh, just noises, sir, just noises.’

Alfred (Alf to his friends) handed Philip his bed-jacket.

‘But what sort of noises?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t quite describe, sir. First there was a pattering of feet on the staircase, really quite loud, and then I heard a voice say, like a sergeant-major’s—very autocratic, if you know what I mean—“Fall in at the double, fall in at the double, fall in at the double.”

‘And what happened then?’

‘Nothing much happened. The footsteps stopped, and a sort of smell—a weedy sort of smell—came into the room. I didn’t pay much attention to it, and then I went to sleep.’

Thinking this over, Philip was puzzled. Could Alfred, or Alf, have possibly known that the house had been occupied by the Army during the war—the Second World War? There were people who could have told him—the gardener and his wife who lived upstairs could have told him, supposing they knew; but would they have had time to tell him, in the few short hours since his arrival?

But there it was—the tramping of footsteps down the uncarpeted staircase (for it would have been uncarpeted during the Army’s occupation), the thrice-repeated command, ‘Fall in at the double’—what did it mean?

And then this weedy smell ?

Philip couldn’t sleep the next night, and expected to be told that Alfred couldn’t sleep either; but when Alfred called him with a bright morning face, and Philip asked him if he had had a good night or a better night, he answered promptly, and as if surprised: ‘Oh yes, sir, I slept like a log.’

Philip was glad to hear this, but something—a suggestion, a muttering from his subconscious mind—still irked him. He knew that certain people—people in the village and outside—had certain reservations about his house. What they were he didn’t know, and naturally, they didn’t tell him; only a faint accent of doubt—as if referring to some rather shady acquaintance—coloured their voices when they spoke of it. But when he asked a friend of his who owned a much larger and grander house, if he thought his riverside abode might be haunted, his friend replied, ‘Oh Philip, but is it old enough?’

Philip was slightly offended. It was a vulgar error to think a ghost needed a long pedigree. His house was quite old enough to be haunted; and this recent visitation, if it was one, had nothing to do with the house’s age as a resort for ghosts.

He was not unduly superstitious but there was a nerve in him that vibrated to supernatural fears, and though he tried to calm them during the following days, by the reflection that he had lived in the house for over twenty years without any trouble other than the normal troubles—burst pipes, gas escapes, failures of electricity and so on, that are the lot of many old and decaying houses—he didn’t feel so comfortable, so at home with his home, with his thoughts as he used to be.

Supposing?

But was there anything, abstract or concrete, spiritual or material, to suppose?

Alfred professed to be psychic, and familiar with poltergeists and other familiars (Philip laughed to himself, rather half-heartedly, at this mental joke), otherwise he wouldn’t have taken the manifestations on the staircase so lightly; but that didn’t explain why they had such an obvious bearing on the recent history of the house.

Forget about it, forget about it, and Philip had almost forgotten about it when, a few nights later, he was awakened by a thunderous knock on his bedroom door, three times repeated. It was the loudest sound he had ever heard; the footsteps of the Commendatore coming up the staircase in Don Giovanni , were nothing like as loud.

‘Come in!’ he shouted, unaware of the time, and almost unaware, having taken a sleeping pill, where he himself was. ‘Come in!’ he shouted again, thinking that perhaps it was Alfred with his early morning tea.

But no one came; and it couldn’t have been Alfred, for when he looked at his watch, it was five o’clock in the morning.

Turning over in bed, he tried to go to sleep; but his subconscious mind had taken alarm and wouldn’t let him; and he lay awake listening for another summons until three hours later, when a much gentler, hardly audible knock, that didn’t even expect an answer, announced Alfred with Philip’s early morning tea.

Philip turned a tired, sleep-deprived face towards him.

‘Did you have a good night, Alfred?’

‘Oh yes, sir, pretty good. A few noises, you know.’

‘You didn’t hear a terrific hammering on my door’ (Alfred’s bedroom door was only an arm’s length from Philip’s) ‘about five o’clock this morning?’

‘Oh no, sir, nothing like that. A few scurrying noises, could have been rats.’

Philip, with lack-lustre eyes, sipped his tea. Could he have imagined the knocking? No, it was much too loud. But could it have been a sound heard in a dream—the tail-end of a dream? Philip hadn’t had many dreams of late years. Sleeping-pills inhibited them; that was one of their side-effects, and a bad one, for dreams were an outlet for the subconscious mind, and if denied this outlet, it took its revenge in other ways. In madness, perhaps? One saw things in dreams of course and one was aware of conversations; but were these conversations conveyed by sound, or by the illusion of the dream? As far as his recollections went, communication in dreams went by sight, and by some telepathic process, and not by sound—certainly not by such sounds as the four tremendous thumps which had awakened him.