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

‘Just a little farther, if you don’t mind,’ said his friend. ‘Where you can see that black patch in the wall: that’s the gate.’

The car crept on.

‘Cold?’ demanded the man at the wheel. ‘These October nights are cold. Stuffy place, the theatre.’

‘Did I sound cold?’ asked his companion, the faint quiver renewing itself in his voice. ‘Oh, I can’t be, it’s such a little way. Feel that,’ he added, holding out his hand.

The driver applied his cheek to it and the car wobbled, bumping against the kerb.

‘Feels warm enough to me,’ he said, ‘hot, in fact. Whoa! Whoa! good horse. This it?’ he added, turning the car’s head round.

‘Yes, but don’t bother to come in, Hubert. The road is so twisty and there may be a branch down. I’m always expecting them to fall, and I’ve had a lot of them wired. You never know with these elm-trees.’

‘Jumpy kind of devil, aren’t you?’ muttered Hubert, extricating himself from the car and standing on the pavement. In the feeble moonlight he looked enormous; Ernest, fiddling with the door on his side, wondered where his friend went to when he tucked himself under the wheel. It must dig into him, he thought.

‘It’s a bit stiff, but you’re turning it the wrong way,’ said Hubert, coming round to Ernest’s side. ‘Easy does it. There you are.’ He held the door open; Ernest stumbled out, missed his footing and was for a moment lost to sight between the more important shadows of his friend and his friend’s car.

‘Hold up, hold up,’ Hubert enjoined him. ‘The road doesn’t need rolling.’ He set Ernest on his feet and the two figures, so unequal in size, gazed mutely into the black square framed by the gateway. Through the trees, which seemed still to bear their complement of boughs, they could just see the outlines of the house, which repeated by their rectangularity the lines of the gateway. It looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower. There was a tiny light in the tower, otherwise the house was dark, the windows being visible as patches of intense black, like eyeless sockets in a negro’s face.

‘You said you were alone in the house,’ remarked Hubert, breaking the silence.

‘Yes,’ his friend replied. ‘In a sense I am.’ He went on standing where he was, with the motor between him and the gateway.

‘In what sense?’ persisted his friend. ‘Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance? In that room with the light in it, for instance——’

‘Oh, no,’ Ernest protested, fidgeting with his feet. ‘That’s only the gas in the box-room. I don’t know how it comes to be alight. It ought not to be. The least thing blows it out. Sometimes I get up in the night and go and see to it. Once I went four times, because it’s so difficult with gas to make sure it’s properly turned off. If you turn it off with your thumb you may easily turn it on again with your little finger, and never notice.’

‘Well, a little puff of gas wouldn’t hurt you,’ observed Hubert, walking to the front of the car and looking at it as though in a moment he would make it do something it didn’t like. ‘Make you sleep better. How’s the insomnia?’

‘Oh, so-so.’

‘Don’t want anyone to hold your hand?’

‘My dear Hubert, of course not.’

Ernest dashingly kicked a pebble which gyrated noisily on the metal surface. When it stopped all sound seemed to cease with it.

‘Tell me about this shadowy companion, Ernest,’ said Hubert, giving one of the tyres such a pinch that Ernest thought the car would scream out.

‘Companion?’ echoed Ernest, puzzled. ‘I—I have no companion.’

‘What did you mean, then, by saying you were only alone “in a sense”?’ demanded Hubert. ‘In what sense? Think that out, my boy,’ He took a, adjusted it, and gave a savage heave. The car shuddered through its whole length and subsided spanner with a sigh.

‘I only meant——’ began Ernest.

‘Please teacher, I only meant,’ mocked Hubert grimly.

‘I only meant,’ said Ernest, ‘that there is a charwoman coming tomorrow at half-past six.’

‘And what time is it now?’

‘A quarter to twelve.’

As Ernest spoke a distant clock chimed the three-quarters—a curious unsatisfied chime that ended on a note of interrogation.

‘How the devil did you know that?’ asked Hubert, his voice rising in protest as if such knowledge were not quite nice.

‘During the night,’ replied Ernest, a hint of self-assertion making itself heard for the first time in his voice, ‘I am very sensitive to the passage of time.’

‘You ought to loan yourself to our dining-room clock,’ observed Hubert. ‘It hasn’t gone these fifteen months. But where are your servants, Ernest? Where’s the pretty parlourmaid? Tell me she’s there and I’d come and stop the night with you.’

‘She isn’t,’ said Ernest. ‘They’re away, all three of them. I came home earlier than I meant. But would you really stay, Hubert? You’ve got a long way to go—eighteen miles, isn’t it?’

‘Afraid I can’t, old man. Got some business to do early to-morrow.’

‘What a pity,’ said Ernest. ‘If I’d asked you sooner perhaps you could have stayed.’

His voice expressed dejection and Hubert, who was making ready to get into the motor, turned round, holding the door half open.

‘Look here, Ernest, I’ll stay if it’s any consolation to you.’

Ernest seemed to be revolving something in his mind.

‘You really think you could?’

‘You’ve only to say the word.’

Again Ernest hesitated.

‘I don’t think there’s a bed aired.’

‘Give me a shake-down in that room with the leaky light.’

Ernest turned aside so that his friend might not see the struggle in his face.

‘Thank you a thousand times, Hubert. But really there’s no need. Truly there isn’t. Though it was most kind of you to suggest it.’ He spoke as though he was trying to soothe an apprehensive child. ‘I couldn’t ask you to.’

‘Well,’ said Hubert, setting his foot on the self-starter, ‘on your own head be it. On your tombstone they’ll write “Here lieth one who turned a friend into the street at midnight”.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Ernest, like a child.

‘Won’t they? Damn this self-starter.’

‘Isn’t it going to work?’ asked Ernest hopefully.

‘Just you wait a moment and I’ll give it hell,’ declared Hubert. He got out and wrung the starting-handle furiously. Still the car refused.

‘It doesn’t seem to want to go,’ said Ernest. ‘You’d much better stay here.’

‘What, now ?’ Hubert exclaimed, as if the car must be taught a lesson, at whatever cost to himself. And then, as though it knew it had met its match, the engine began to throb.

‘Good-night, Ernest. Pleasant dreams!’

‘Good-night, Hubert, and thank you so much. And, oh . . . Hubert!’

The motor began to slow down as Hubert heard Ernest’s cry, and his footsteps pattering down the street.

‘I only wanted to ask what your telephone number was.’

‘Don’t I wish I knew! Number double o double o infinity. The thing’s been coming every day for six weeks.’

‘It’s not likely to have been put in to-day while you were away?’

‘No, old boy: more likely when I’m there. Good-night, and don’t let yourself get blown up.’

In a few seconds all sound of the motor died away. The god had departed in his car.

‘Shall I shut the gates?’ thought Ernest. ‘No, someone might want to come in. People don’t usually drive up to a house in the dead of night, but you can’t be sure: there are always accidents, petrol runs out; or it might be an old friend, turned up from abroad. Stranded after leaving the boat-train. “London was so full I couldn’t get in anywhere, so I came on here, Ernest, to throw myself on your mercy.” “You were quite right, Reggie; wait a moment, and I’ll have you fixed up.” How easy it would have been to say that to Hubert. But I was quite right, really, to let him go: I mustn’t give way to myself, I must learn to live alone, like other people. How nice to be some poor person, a street-arab, for instance, just left school, who had come into some money and naturally bought this house. He’s spent a jolly evening with a friend, been to a theatre and comes home quite late, well, almost at midnight.’ And no sooner had the word crossed Ernest’s mind than he heard, almost with a sense of private complicity, almost as though he had uttered them himself, the first notes of the midnight chime. He could not think against them; and looking round a little dazed he saw he had come only a very few steps into the garden. But already the house seemed larger; he could make out the front door, plumb in the middle of the building, sunk in its neo-Gothic ogee arch. He was standing on a closely clipped lawn; but to his right, across the carriageway, he knew there was that odd flat tract in the long grass. It always looked as if something large had trampled upon it, lain upon it, really: it was like the form of an enormous hare, and each blade of grass was broken-backed and sallow, as though the juice had been squeezed out of it.