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

‘Oh, yes. Don’t look as if you had seen a ghost. It’s a perfectly ordinary room, I tell you, except for one thing. No, stop a moment; wait here while I arrange the scene.’

He darted in, and after a moment summoned Valentine to follow.

‘Now, do you notice anything strange?’

‘I see the usual evidences of untidiness.’

A coat was lying on the floor and various articles of clothing were scattered about.

‘You do? Well then—no deceit, gentlemen.’ With a gesture he snatched the coat up from the floor. ‘Now what do you see?’

‘I see a further proof of slovenly habits—a pair of shoes where the coat was.’

‘Look well at those shoes. There’s nothing about them that strikes you as peculiar?’

Valentine studied them. They were ordinary brown shoes, lying side by side, the soles uppermost, a short pace from the wardrobe. They looked as though someone had taken them off and forgotten to put them away, or taken them out, and forgotten to put them on.

‘Well,’ pronounced Valentine at last, ‘I don’t usually leave my shoes upside-down like that, but you might.’

‘Ah,’ said Hugh triumphantly, ‘your surmise is incorrect. They’re not my shoes.”

‘Not yours? Then they were left here by mistake. Franklin should have taken them away.’

‘Yes, but that’s where the coat comes in. I’m reconstructing the scene, you see, hoping to impress you. While he was downstairs fetching my bag, to save time I began to undress; I took my coat off and hurled it down there. After he had gone I picked it up. So he never saw the shoes.’

‘Well, why make such a fuss? They won’t be wanted till morning. Or would you rather ring for Franklin and tell him to take them away?’.

‘Ah!’ cried Hugh, delighted by this. ‘At last you’ve come to the heart of the matter. He couldn’t take them away.’

‘Why couldn’t he?’

‘Because they’re fixed to the floor!’

‘Oh, rubbish!’ said Valentine. ‘You must be dreaming.’

He bent down, took hold of the shoes by the welts, and gave a little tug. They did not move.

‘There you are!’ cried Hugh. ‘Apologize. Own that it is unusual to find in one’s room a strange pair of shoes adhering to the floor.’

Valentine’s reply was to give another heave. Still the shoes did not budge.

‘No good,’ commented his friend. ‘They’re nailed down, or gummed down, or something. The dinner-bell hasn’t rung; we’ll get Franklin to clear up the mystery.’

The butler when he came looked uneasy, and surprised them by speaking first.

‘Was it Mr. Munt you were wanting, sir?’ he said to Valentine. ‘I don’t know where he is. I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find him.’

‘Are these his shoes by any chance?’ asked Valentine.

They couldn’t deny themselves the mild entertainment of watching Franklin stoop down to pick up the shoes, and recoil in perplexity when he found them fast in the floor.

‘These should be Mr. Munt’s, sir,’ he said doubtfully—‘these should. But what’s happened to them that they won’t leave the floor?’

The two friends laughed gaily.

‘That’s what we want to know,’ Hugh Curtis chuckled. ‘That’s why we called you: we thought you could help us.’

‘They’re Mr. Munt’s right enough,’ muttered the butler. ‘They must have got something heavy inside.’

‘Damned heavy,’ said Valentine, playfully grim.

Fascinated, the three men stared at the upturned soles, so close together that there was no room between for two thumbs set side by side.

Rather gingerly the butler stooped again, and tried to feel the uppers. This was not as easy as it seemed, for the shoes were flattened against the floor, as if a weight had pressed them down.

His face was white as he stood up.

‘There is something in them,’ he said in a frightened voice.

‘And his shoes were full of feet,’ carolled Valentine flippantly. ‘Trees, perhaps.’

‘It was not as hard as wood,’ said the butler. ‘You can squeeze it a bit if you try.’

They looked at each other, and a tension made itself felt in the room.

‘There’s only one way to find out,’ declared Hugh Curtis suddenly, in a determined tone one could never have expected from him.

‘How?’

‘Take them off.’

‘Take what off?’

‘His shoes off, you idiot.’

‘Off what?’

‘That’s what I don’t know yet, you bloody fool!’ Curtis almost screamed; and kneeling down, he tore apart the laces and began tugging and wrenching at one of the shoes.

‘It’s coming, it’s coming,’ he cried. ‘Valentine, put your arms around me and pull, that’s a good fellow. It’s the heel that’s giving the trouble.’

Suddenly the shoe slipped off.

‘Why, it’s only a sock,’ whispered Valentine; ‘it’s so thin.’

‘Yes, but the foot’s inside it all right,’ cried Curtis in a loud strange voice, speaking very rapidly. ‘And here’s the ankle, see, and here’s where it begins to go down into the floor, see; he must have been a very small man; you see I never saw him, but it’s all so crushed—’

The sound of a heavy fall made them turn.

Franklin had fainted.

The house-warming at Low Threshold Hall was not an event that affected many people. The local newspaper, however, had half a column about it, and one or two daily papers supplemented the usual August dearth of topics with pictures of the house. They were all taken from the same angle, and showed a long, low building in the Queen Anne style flowing away from a square tower on the left which was castellated and obviously of much earlier date, the whole structure giving somewhat the impression to a casual glance of a domesticated church, or even of a small railway train that had stopped dead on finding itself in a park. Beneath the photograph was written something like ‘Suffolk Manor House re-occupied after a hundred and fifty years,’ and, in one instance, ‘Inset, (L.) Mr. Charles Ampleforth, owner of Low Threshold Hall; (R.) Sir George Willings, the architect responsible for the restoration of this interesting mediaeval relic’ Mr. Ampleforth’s handsome, slightly Disraelian head, nearly spiked on his own flagpole, smiled congratulations at the grey hair and rounded features of Sir George Willings who, suspended like a bubble above the Queen Anne wing, discreetly smiled back.

To judge from the photograph, time had dealt gently with Low Threshold Hall. Only a trained observer could have told how much of the original fabric had been renewed. The tower looked particularly convincing. While as for the gardens sloping down to the stream which bounded the foreground of the picture—they had that old-world air which gardens so quickly acquire. To see those lush lawns and borders as a meadow, that mellow brickwork under scaffolding, needed a strong effort of the imagination.

But the guests assembled in Mr. Ampleforth’s drawing-room after dinner and listening to their host as, not for the first time, he enlarged upon the obstacles faced and overcome in the work of restoration, found it just as hard to believe that the house was old. Most of them had been taken to see it, at one time or another, in process of reconstruction; yet even within a few days of its completion, how unfinished a house looks! Its habitability seems determined in the last few hours. Magdalen Winthrop, whose beautiful, expressive face still (to her hostess’ sentimental eye) bore traces of the slight disappointment she had suffered earlier in the evening, felt as if she were in an Aladdin’s palace. Her glance wandered appreciatively from the Samarcand rugs to the pale green walls, and dwelt with pleasure on the high shallow arch, flanked by slender columns, the delicate lines of which were emphasized by the darkness of the hall behind them. It all seemed so perfect and so new; not only every sign of decay but the very sense of age had been banished. How absurd not to be able to find a single grey hair, so to speak, in a house that had stood empty for a hundred and fifty years! Her eyes, still puzzled, came to rest on the company, ranged in an irregular circle round the open fireplace.