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

When a policeman has tried the handle of the door and found it shut, he often, if he is a true guardian of the law, proceeds to examine the windows. ‘Hullo, there, hullo! hullo!’ And a handful of gravel, maybe, rattles against the window-panes. Leaping or creeping out of bed, according to his temperament, the startled householder goes to the window. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Nothing’s the matter, only your window’s unfastened. There are queer people about tonight—gypsies. You had better come down and fasten it unless you want your silver stolen.’ ‘Thank you very much, officer; good-night.’ And down patters paterfamilias in his warm slippers and his dressing-gown, while the constable patrols the garden with comfortable tread. No one dare molest him, not even if he is ever so wicked. And whoever heard of a wicked policeman? thought Ernest, reconnoitring, at some distance, the dining-room window. He tramps through the shrubberies, cats fly before him, his bull’s-eye lantern turns night into day, he could walk through the spinney where the mound is and never turn a hair. And this is how he would open the dining-room window.

It was a sash-window, hanging loose in its grooves. Ernest inserted his pocket-knife in the crevice and started to prize it open. To his delight and dismay the sash began to move. Half an inch higher and he would be able to get his fingers under it. He was using the haft of the knife now, not the blade. The sash began to move more easily. He curled his fingers under and round it. His face, twisted with exertion, stared blankly upon the cream-coloured blind inside. The blind stirred. He must have let in a current of air. He redoubled his exertions. The sash slid up six inches, and then stuck fast. And he could see why. A hand, pressed flat along the bottom of the sash, was holding it down.

Ernest let go with a cry, and the window was slowly and smoothly closed. He had an impulse to run but he resisted it, and forced himself to walk back to the window. The hand was gone.

Imagine you were a window-cleaner and wanted to open a window and some playful member of the family—a great over-grown lout of a boy, for instance—took it into his head to play a prank like that on you. You know what boys are; they have no mercy; there is a bully embedded in all of them, and pretty near the surface in most. That being so, what would you make of the young gentleman’s interference? What line would you take? Clearly he won’t hurt you, and he can’t, besides, be everywhere at once. Perhaps somebody calls him, or he finds the cat and pulls its tail or blows tobacco-smoke into the spaniel’s eyes. For such a lad as that there are a hundred distractions; and while you are quietly going on with your job at the drawing-room window he will be making an apple-pie bed for his small sister in the nursery: too engrossed, my dear Ernest, to remember your existence, certainly too much occupied to follow you about.

And it did seem that Ernest the window cleaner was likely to be more successful than Ernest the policeman. Crouching like an animal, his hands hanging down in front of him, keeping close to the wall, brushing himself against creepers, scratched by thorns and blackened by soot, at last he reached the drawing-room window and flung himself on his face beneath the sill. The sill was a low one. Half kneeling, half supporting himself on his elbows, he raised himself till his eyes were level with the glass. The fitful moonlight played on this side of the house; a treacherous light, but it served to show him that the Puck of Stithies was occupied elsewhere. With extreme caution, holding his breath, he negotiated the difficult preliminaries; then he stood up straight, and heaved with all his might. The window rushed up a foot and then stuck. Involuntarily he glanced down: yes, there was the hand, flattened on the frame: there was another hand, holding back the blind, and there was a face, not very distinct, but certainly a face.

It was the hand that Ernest, cowering under the thick umbrage of the drooping-ash, remembered best. The face was anybody’s face, not really unlike Hubert’s: a ruddy, capable face: not exactly angry, but stern, official-looking. But the odd thing about the hand was that it didn’t seem like the hand of another person. It was larger than Ernest’s, yet he had felt, for the moment that it was presented before his eyes, that it would respond to his volition, move as he wanted it to move. He had been too frightened, at the moment, to act upon this fantastic notion; but couldn’t he act upon it next time? Next time. But why not? Imagine a man of average capabilities, physically none too robust, but with a good headpiece on him. He can afford to spare himself; even when he takes on a job that is strange to him he will find out the easiest way, will know just the right moment to bring to bear what little strength he has. Many a slenderly built chap, at the bidding of necessity, has transformed himself into a passable coal-heaver. But to carry a sack of coal or a sack of anything one needs a knack: it’s no good taking the load into your arms, you must hoist it on to your back. And when you’ve carried a sack or two like that, who knows that your luck mayn’t change? Many a man who carried a sack in his time, in later life has supped with princes.

Ernest scrambled up the slates, slithered down a gully and grasped the balustrade of the battlement. He had found his way instinctively, or did he remember it? If he hadn’t been familiar with the lie of the roofs, even to the point of knowing what slates were loose and would crack or, worse, creak when you trod, how could he have avoided a sprained ankle or a serious fall? Yes, certainly he knew his way about the leads and slates; who wouldn’t, if they had lived in a house from childhood, and loved it, though it frightened them, and wanted to have it, and meant to have it, and what went with it, though by a slip of the pen it belonged to someone else?

The window of the Blue Room was just round the corner. Imagine yourself a steeplejack. How delicious to know, while you went about your work with a crowbar or a hammer or whatever heavy, unwieldy instrument it might be, that there was a railing of stone and mortar, two feet high and six inches thick, between you and the ground! The steeplejack would feel he wasn’t earning his pay when his life was safeguarded like that. Well, here’s a foolproof job! Like putting a grown man in a child’s cot, with a high brass chevaux-de-frise round it. But nevertheless, rounding the bend, Ernest was overtaken by nausea and lay for some moments stretched out upon the leaden gully, twitching.

But supposing a man was kept out by force from his possessions, or what should have been his? Who would blame him, who would not applaud him, if he went to any reasonable length to recover his property? Should he consult his own safety, or anyone’s safety, when he was engaged upon such an undertaking?

Ernest dragged himself to the window. His head was level with the upper sash which was fast in the wall, and looked as if it was fixed there. But the lower sash was about six inches open, with the fold of a blue blind projecting from it.

Up went the sash a long, long way as it seemed, much farther than the others. But as he lifted it there was a whirring sound; the tegument of the blind vanished. The new proprietor was standing there. Ernest stared at him. Was it the face of the poor man who had come into money and acquired Stithies? Or of the coward who owned it? Or of the policeman who protected it, or of the man who cleaned its windows? Or of the coal-heaver or of the steeplejack or of the man who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way? It seemed in turn to be all these, yet its essential character never changed. Dazed as he was, Ernest remembered to drop his hands. The apparition dropped his; the window was unguarded. Slowly Ernest lowered and advanced his head. But he had not reckoned on his enemy’s faculty for imitation. The simulacrum bowed, leant forward, pressed its face to within three inches of Ernest’s. And as it hung there the last expression faded out of it, and was replaced by a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent. Yet something began to take shape in that mobile, almost fluid tract. Ernest did not wait for it to declare itself, this new visage whose lines he could almost see graven in the air before they settled and bit deep into the flesh.