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

He was on the dripstone of the tower now, clinging with his fingers to the sham machicolations. Suppose a man meant to commit a murder, did he shrink from risking his own life? Wasn’t anything easy to him, in the presence of such a determination? Hadn’t it been easy to him, Ernest, when he stood, some ten years ago, on this same dizzy ledge and found, after three failures, the one vulnerable point of Stithies, the box-room window?

Sweating and gasping he reached the window and clung to the stanchion, his back, weak with exhaustion, bending outwards like a bow. But his prescient tormentor had outstripped him. This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest’s own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.

Punctually at half-past six, in the gathering light, Mrs. Playward passed through the open gateway into the garden of Stithies Court. ‘Bless me,’ she thought. ‘What with the maids away and the young gentleman in bed I shan’t be able to get in.’ The suspicion that she had made the journey for nothing weighed heavily on Mrs. Playward. ‘It’s not as if I am as young as I was,’ she told herself. But, having come so far, it was worth while to make sure that none of the doors was unlocked. The front door seemed to open of itself, such was her amazement at finding it unfastened. ‘Well, I never,’ she declared. ‘And he always said to be so fidgety about robbers.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘Best to get it over,’ she muttered. ‘If there’s one step there’s eighty.’ Having collected the machinery of her profession she mounted the spiral staircase that led to the box-room. Her eyesight was defective, a fact to which, when reproached for apparent negligence, she often drew the attention of her clients. The staircase was lighted by a couple of slit windows, set deep in the wall. At the second of them she paused, partly to recover her breath, partly to relieve her eyes from the strain of peering into the gloom. By leaning forward she could just see the road below. ‘Well, I declare,’ she muttered, ‘if Polkin hasn’t been and left his overcoat out on the path all night. That good black one he told me he was promised by Mr. Ernest. Some men don’t know when they’re well off.’ Breathing heavily she resumed her journey. The condition of this box-room was heart-breaking, trunks, cardboard boxes, gas-rings, fenders, disused furniture all covered with a layer of dust. But she hardly noticed that because a stranger sight claimed her attention. The casement window was wide open.

She walked towards it. A huge black trunk with a flat top stood directly under the window, and in the dust which thickly coated it there were four curious marks. Two pairs of each. The farther ones, the marks nearest the window, she made out at once. They were the prints of hands. The fingers, pointing into the room, were splayed out and unnaturally elongated; where the hand joined the wrist there was a long shapeless smear. Opposite them, and within an arm’s length, were the other marks. At first they meant nothing to her: two symmetrical black smudges with rounded tops and a thin track of dust between them. The imprint of a man’s knees perhaps? Panic descended on Mrs. Playward. She fled, screaming ‘Mr. Ernest, Mr. Ernest, something has happened in the box-room!’ No one answered her; when she hammered on Mr. Ernest’s door no one replied, and when she went in, the room was empty.

Henry Greenstream had always looked forward to his afternoon walk. It divided the day for him. In ideal circumstances a siesta preceded it and he awoke to a new morning, a false dawn, it is true, but as pregnant with unexpressed promise as the real one. For some weeks now, however, sleep had deserted his after-luncheon cushion; he could get to the brink of unconsciousness, when thoughts and pictures drifted into his mind independently of his will, but not over.

Still, the walk was the main thing even if he started on it a little tired. It calmed, it satisfied, it released. For an hour and twenty-five minutes he enjoyed the freedom of the birds of the air. Impressions and sensations offered themselves to him in an unending flow, never outstaying their welcome, never demanding more from his attention than a moment’s recognition. Lovely and pleasant voices that tonelessly proclaimed the harmony between him, Henry Greenstream, and the spirit of all created things.

Or they had proclaimed it till lately. Lately the rhythm of his thoughts had been disturbed by an interloper, yes, an interloper, but an interloper from within. Like a cuckoo that soon ceased to be a visitor, the stranger had entered his mind and now dwelt there, snatching at the nourishment meant for its legitimate neighbours. They pined, they grew sickly while Henry Greenstream suckled the parasite.

He knew what it was and whence it came. It was an infection from his conscience which had taken offence at an act so trivial that surely no other conscience would have noticed it. Indeed, he had himself almost forgotten what it originated in—something about a breach of confidence that (reason assured him a thousand times) could have harmed nobody. And when it stirred inside him it was not to remind him of his fault and recall the circumstances of his lapse, but simply to hurt him; to prick the tender tegument which, unpierced, assures comfort to the mind.

If it did not spoil his life it fretted him, reducing his capacity for enjoyment; and most of all did it make its presence felt when he took his afternoon exercise. The aery shapes that then haunted his imagination could not suppress it, nor was the scenery through which he passed such as to distract him from himself. Town gave way to suburb; suburb to ribbon development; only when it was time to turn back did he emerge into the unspoilt countryside. Motors rushed by; an occasional tramp asked for a match; dogs idled on the pavement. All this was uninspiring but at the same time it fostered his mood; even the ugly little houses, with their curtains drawn aside to reveal a plant or a pretentious piece of china, invited pleasing speculations. Confidently he looked forward to his reunion with these humble landmarks. But they had lost their power to draw him out, and lately he had invented a new and less satisfying form of mental pastime. Much less satisfying; for it consisted in counting the minutes that elapsed between one visitation of the Thought and the next. Even so might a Chinese malefactor seek to beguile himself while under the water-torture by calculating the incidence of the drops.

Where the signpost pointed to Aston Highchurch Mr. Greenstream paused. He had been walking half an hour and the Thought had recurred twenty-two times; that was an average of nearly once a minute, a higher average than yesterday, when he had got off with fourteen repetitions. It was in fact a record: a bad record. What could he do to banish this tedious symptom? Stop counting, perhaps? Make his mind a blank? He wandered on with uncertain footsteps unlike his ordinary purposeful stride. Ahead of him the October sun was turning down the sky, behind, the grass (for the fields now began to outnumber the houses) took on a golden hue; above, the clouds seemed too lazy to obey what little wind there was. It was a lovely moment that gathered to itself all the harmony of which the restless earth was capable. Mr. Greenstream opened his heart to the solace of the hour and was already feeling refreshed when ping! the Thought stung him again.

‘I must do something about this,’ thought Mr. Greenstream, ‘or I shall go mad.’

He looked round. To his left, in the hedge beyond the grass verge, was a wicket-gate, and from it a path ran diagonally over the shoulder of a little hill, a shabby asphalt path that gleamed in the sunlight and disappeared, tantalizingly, into the horizon. Mr. Greenstream knew where it led, to Aston Highchurch; but so conservative was he that in all these years of tramping down the main road he had never taken it. He did so now. In a few minutes he was on the high land in what seemed a different world, incredibly nearer the sky. Turning left along a country lane bordered by trees and less agreeably by chicken runs, he kept catching sight of a church; and at length he came to a path that led straight to it across a stubble field. It lay with its back to him, long and low, with a square tower at the further end that gave it the look of a cat resting on tucked-in legs, perhaps beginning to purr.