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

Conrad had been torn from the King’s side and hurried into the building before he knew what he was doing. Several people promised to show him the way, but when they had gone a little distance, they forgot about him, and flew off, with shouts of laughter, to join their own friends. Conrad seemed to be alone in the long dark corridor, but when he looked round, there was a man standing at the far end of it. Conrad walked towards him, calling out to him to wait; but the fellow hurried on, though how he could go like that, his face looking backwards all the time, Conrad did not understand.

Through doors, along passages, down steps they went, always with the same distance between them, always getting lower and lower; Conrad felt the cold on his cheeks and hands. At last a door, indistinguishable from the surrounding masonry, opened, showing a room. Conrad followed his guide in, then lost sight of him.

On a couch by the wall lay the Princess, her head turned away, and in the whiteness of her neck a gash dreadful to behold. On the wall above her hung the shadow to which her indescribable beauty had lent a kind of life: it could not long survive her, and just as Conrad took in the perfection of its loveliness, it faded.

He fell on his knees by the couch. How long he knelt, he could not tell, but when he looked up, the room was full of people.

‘You have killed her,’ someone said.

Conrad rose and faced them.

‘I did not kill her: I killed the Dragon!’

‘Look,’ said another voice. ‘She has the same wound in her neck.’

‘That wound I gave the Dragon.’

‘And what is this?’ asked a third, pointing to a ball of linen, tightly grasped in Princess Hermione’s outstretched hand. He took it and shook it out: the smell of chloroform filled the air. A cluster of eyes read the name in the corner of the handkerchief: it was Conrad’s.

‘And you poisoned her as well!’ they gasped.

‘That poison,’ said Conrad, ‘I gave to the Dragon.’

One or two nodded their heads; but the rest shouted:

‘But you must have killed her! How else did she die?’

Conrad passed his hand across his face.

‘Why should I kill her? I love her,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘It was the Dragon I killed.’

Then, as they all gazed at him fascinated, he added:

‘But the Dragon was the Princess!’

Immediately there was a terrible hubbub, and to shouts of ‘Liar, ‘Murderer,’ ‘Traitor,’ Conrad was hustled from the room and lodged in a neighbouring dungeon. He was released almost immediately and never brought up for trial, though a section of the Press demanded it.

A story was put about that the Princess had somehow met her death defending Conrad from the Dragon; and Conrad, when asked if this was so, would not altogether deny it. His hour of popularity as slayer of the Dragon soon passed, and in its place he incurred the lasting odium of having been somehow concerned in the Princess’s death. ‘He ought never to have used that chloroform,’ was a criticism repeated with growing indignation from mouth to mouth. ‘No sportsman would have.’ It was a mark of patriotism to make light of the Dragon’s misdeeds, for their long continuance redounded little to the country’s credit and capacity. They were speedily forgotten, while the fame of Princess Hermione, a national treasure, went mounting ever higher in the hearts of her countrymen. Before the year was out, Conrad heard a man in the street say to his friend:

‘What does it matter if the Princess did change herself into a dragon? She only did it for a lark.’

Conrad went back to his home, but he soon received an official intimation that in his own and the common interest, he ought to leave the country. The government would find him a passport and pay his fare. This was all the reward he got for killing the Dragon, but he went gladly enough—the more gladly that Charlotte consented to go with him. She stipulated, however, that they should make their home in a Republic. There they were married and lived happily ever after.

How well I remembered the summer aspect of Mrs. Santander’s island, and the gratefully deciduous trees among the pines of that countryside coming down to the water’s edge and over it! How their foliage, sloping to a shallow dome, sucked in the sunlight, giving it back all grey and green! The sea, tossing and glancing, refracted the light from a million spumy points; the tawny sand glared, a monochrome unmitigated by shades; and the cliffs, always bare, seemed to have achieved an unparalleled nudity, every speck on their brown flanks clamouring for recognition.

Now every detail was blurred or lost. In the insufficient, ill-distributed November twilight the island itself was invisible. Forms and outlines survive but indistinctly in the memory; it was hard to believe that the spit of shingle on which I stood was the last bulwark of that huge discursive land-locked harbour, within whose meagre mouth Mrs. Santander’s sea-borne territory seemed to ride at anchor. In the summer I pictured it as some crustacean, swallowed by an ill-turned starfish, but unassimilated. How easy it had been to reach it in Mrs. Santander’s gay plunging motor-boat! And how inaccessible it seemed now, with the motor-boat fallen, as she had written to tell me, into war-time disuse, with a sea running high and so dark that, save for the transparent but scarcely luminous wave-tips, it looked like an agitated solid. The howling of the wind, and the oilskins in which he was encased, made it hard to attract the ferryman’s attention. I shouted to him: ‘Can you take me over to the island?’

‘No, I can’t,’ said the ferryman, and pointed to the tumultuous waves in the harbour.

‘What are you here for?’ I bawled. ‘I tell you I must get across; I have to go back to France to-morrow.’

In such circumstances it was impossible to argue without heat. The ferryman turned, relenting a little. He asked querulously in the tone of one who must raise a difficulty at any cost: ‘What if we both get drowned?’

What a fantastic objection! ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘There’s no sea to speak of; anyhow, I’ll make it worth your while.’

The ferryman grunted at my unintentional pleasantry. Then, as the landing stage was submerged by the exceptionally high tide, he carried me on his back to the boat, my feet trailing in the water. The man lurched at every step, for I was considerably heavier than he; but at last, waist-deep in water, he reached the boat and turned sideways for me to embark. How uncomfortable the whole business was. Why couldn’t Mrs. Santander spend November in London like other people? Why was I so infatuated as to follow her here on the last night of my leave when I might have been lolling in the stalls of a theatre? The craft was behaving oddly, rolling so much that at every other stroke one of the boatman’s attenuated seafaring oars would be left high and dry. Once, when we happened to be level with each other, I asked him the reason of Mrs. Santander’s seclusion. At the top of his voice he replied: ‘Why, they do say she be lovesick. Look out!’ he added, for we had reached the end of our short passage and were “standing by” in the succession of breakers. But the ferryman misjudged it. Just as the keel touched the steep shingle bank, a wave caught the boat, twisted it round and half over, and I lost my seat and rolled about in the bottom of the boat, getting very wet.

How dark it was among the trees. Acute physical discomfort had almost made me forget Mrs. Santander. But as I stumbled up the grassy slope I longed to see her.

She was not in the hall to welcome me. The butler, discreetly noticing my condition, said: ‘We will see about your things, sir.’ I was thankful to take them off, and I flung them about the floor of my bedroom—that huge apartment that would have been square but for the bow-window built on to the end. The wind tore at this window, threatening to drive it in; but not a curtain moved. Soundlessness, I remembered, was characteristic of the house. Indeed, I believe you might have screamed yourself hoarse in that room and not have been heard in the adjoining bathroom. Thither I hastened and wallowed long and luxuriously in the marble bath; deliberately I splashed the water over the side, simply to see it collected and marshalled away down the little grooves that unerringly received it. When I emerged, swathed in hot towels, I found my clothes already dried and pressed. Wonderful household. A feeling of unspeakable well-being descended upon me as, five minutes before dinner-time, I entered the drawing-room. It was empty. What pains Mrs. Santander must be bestowing on her toilette! Was it becoming her chief asset? I wondered. Perish the thought! She had a hundred charms of movement, voice and expression, and yet she defied analysis. She was simply irresistible! How Santander, her impossible husband, could have retired to South America to nurse an injured pride, or as he doubtless called it, an injured honour, passed my comprehension. She had an art to make the most commonplace subject engaging. I remembered having once admired the lighting of the house. I had an odd fancy that it had a quality not found elsewhere, a kind of whiteness, a power of suggesting silence. It helped to give her house its peculiar hush. ‘Yes,’ she had said, ‘and it’s all so simple; the sea makes it, just by going in and out!’ A silly phrase, but her intonation made it linger in the memory like a charm.