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

The next thing Maggie heard was the motor-car returning with the doctor. Not daring to go out, and unable to sit down, she stood, how long she did not know, holding her bedroom door ajar. At last she saw the nurse coming towards her.

‘The patient’s a little better, Miss Winthrop. The doctor thinks he’ll pull through now.’

‘Which patient?’

‘Oh, there was never any hope for the other poor fellow.’

Maggie closed her eyes.

‘Can I see Antony?’ she said at last.

‘Well, you may just peep at him.’

Antony smiled at her feebly from the bed.

‘But,’ protested Marion Lane, ‘you don’t mean that we’ve all got to dance the cotillon in masks? Won’t that be terribly hot?’

‘My dear,’ Jane Manning, her friend and hostess, reminded her, ‘this is December, not July. Look!’ She pointed to the window, their only protection against a soft bombardment of snowflakes.

Marion moved across from the fireplace where they were sitting and looked out. The seasonable snow had just begun to fall, as though in confirmation of Mrs. Manning’s words. Here and there the gravel still showed black under its powdery coating, and on the wing of the house which faced east the shiny foliage of the magnolia, pitted with pockets of snow, seemed nearly black too. The trees of the park which yesterday, when Marion arrived, were so distinct against the afternoon sky that you could see their twigs, were almost invisible now, agitated shapes dim in the slanting snow. She turned back to the room.

‘I think the cotillon’s a good idea, and I don’t want to make difficulties,’ she said. ‘I’m not an obstructionist by nature, am I? Tell me if I am.’

‘My dear, of course you’re not.’

‘Well, I was thinking, wouldn’t half the fun of the cotillon be gone if you didn’t know who was who? I mean, in those figures when the women powder the men’s faces, and rub their reflections off the looking-glass, and so on. There doesn’t seem much point in powdering a mask.’

‘My darling Marion, the mask’s only a bit of black silk that covers the top part of one’s face; you don’t imagine we shan’t recognize each other?’

‘You may,’ said Marion, ‘find it difficult to recognize the largest, barest face. I often cut my best friends in the street. They needn’t put on a disguise for me not to know them.’

‘But you can tell them by their voices.’

‘Supposing they won’t speak?’

‘Then you must ask questions.’

‘But I shan’t know half the people here.’

‘You’ll know all of us in the house,’ her friend said; ‘that’s sixteen to start with. And you know the Grays and the Fosters and the Boltons. We shall only be about eighty, if as many.’

‘Counting gate-crashers?’

‘There won’t be any.’

‘But how will you be able to tell, if they wear masks?’

‘I shall know the exact numbers, for one thing, and for another, at midnight, when the cotillon stops, everyone can take their masks off—must, in fact.’

‘I see.’

The room was suddenly filled with light. A servant had come in to draw the curtains. They sat in silence until he had finished the last of the windows; there were five of them in a row.

‘I had forgotten how long this room was,’ Marion said. ‘You’ll have the cotillon here, I suppose?’

‘It’s the only possible place. I wish it were a little longer, then we could have a cushion race. But I’m afraid we shall have to forgo that. It would be over as soon as it began.’

The servant arranged the tea-table in front of them and went away.

‘Darling,’ said Jane suddenly, ‘before Jack comes in from shooting with his tired but noisy friends, I want to say what a joy it is to have you here. I’m glad the others aren’t coming till Christmas Eve. You’ll have time to tell me all about yourself.’

‘Myself?’ repeated Marion. She stirred in her chair. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Dearest, I can’t believe it! There must be, after all these months. My life is dull, you know—no, not dull, quiet. And yours is always so mouvementée .’

‘ It used to be,’ admitted Marion. ‘It used to be; but now I——’

There was a sound of footsteps and laughter at the door, and a voice cried ‘Jenny, Jenny, have you some tea for us?’

‘You shall have it in a moment,’ Mrs. Manning called back. Sighing, she turned to her friend.

‘We must postpone our little séance.’

Five days had gone by—it was the evening of the twenty-seventh, the night of the ball. Marion went up to her room to rest. Dinner was at half-past eight, so she had nearly two hours’ respite. She lay down on the bed and turned out all the lights except the one near her head. She felt very tired. She had talked so much during the past few days that even her thoughts had become articulate; they would not stay in her mind; they rose automatically to her lips, or it seemed to her that they did. ‘I am glad I did not tell Jenny,’ she soliloquised; ‘it would only have made her think worse of me, and done no good. What a wretched business.’ She extinguished the light, but the gramophone within her went on more persistently than ever. It was a familiar record; she knew every word of it: it might have been called The Witness for the Defence . ‘He had no reason to take me so seriously,’ announced the machine in self-excusatory accents. ‘I only wanted to amuse him. It was Hugh Travers who introduced us: he knows what I am like; he must have told Harry; men always talk these things over among themselves. Hugh had a grievance against me, too, once; but he got over it; I have never known a man who didn’t.’ For a moment Marion’s thoughts broke free from their bondage to the turning wheel and hovered over her past life. Yes, more or less, they had all got over it. ‘I never made him any promise.’ pursued the record, inexorably taking up its tale: ‘what right had he to think he could coerce me? Hugh ought not to have let us meet, knowing the kind of man he was—and—and the kind of woman I was. I was very fond of him, of course; but he would have been so exacting, he was so exacting. All the same,’ continued the record—sliding a moment into the major key only to relapse into the minor—‘left to myself I could have managed it all right, as I always have. It was pure bad luck that he found me that night with the other Harry. That was a dreadful affair.’ At this point the record, as always, wobbled and scratched: Marion had to improvise something less painful to bridge over the gap. Her thoughts flew to the other Harry and dwelt on him tenderly; he would never have made a scene if he could have helped it; he had been so sweet to her afterwards. ‘It was just bad luck,’ the record resumed; ‘I didn’t want to blast his happiness and wreck his life, or whatever he says I did.’

What had he actually said? There was an ominous movement in Marion’s mind. The mechanism was being wound up, was going through the whole dreary performance again. Anything rather than that! She turned on the light, jumped off the bed, and searched among her letters. The moment she had it in her hand, she realized that she knew it by heart.

Dear Marion,

After what has happened I don’t suppose you will want to see me again, and though I want to see you, I think it better for us both that I shouldn’t. I know it sounds melodramatic to say it, but you have spoilt my life, you have killed something inside me. I never much valued Truth for its own sake, and I am grateful to Chance for affording me that peep behind the scenes last night. I am more grateful to you for keeping up the disguise as long as you did. But though you have taken away so much, you have left me one flicker of curiosity: before I die (or after, it doesn’t much matter!) I should like to see you (forgive the expression) unmasked, so that for a moment I can compare the reality with the illusion I used to cherish. Perhaps I shall. Meanwhile good-bye.