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

‘By this time I had lost all shyness or self-consciousness: I rang, I waited, I put my question with the impersonal authority of someone asking for help; only vaguely did I register the fact that these doors were better kept and that a different type of person answered them.

‘The last door bell was answered by a maid: she stood in the doorway unsmiling and suspicious. She had a pinched face, hard eyes, and hair drawn tightly back.

‘ “C’è una signorina,” I began. “There is a young lady——”

‘ “Si,” she said, “yes”—and it was like the crack of a whip. “Ma la signorina non riceve nessuno”—“The young lady receives no one.”

‘ “Receives no one?” I gasped, and something told me that I had come to the end of my quest. “She receives no one!” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

‘"No one,” the maid answered stubbornly, “proprio nessuno”—“no one at all.”

‘She was shutting the door on me when I cried:

‘ “But I have an appointment with her!”

‘ “How can you have an appointment with her?” the maid said scornfully. “I tell you she sees no one, only her family, and, and . . .” She stopped.

‘ “And who?” I demanded.

‘But she had already changed her mind about telling me, and shook her head saying, “Non importa—it doesn’t matter—it’s not you.”

‘At that the pillars of reality seemed to dissolve, and framed in the doorway was not the maid keeping me out, or the wall of the passage behind her, but the green trees undulating upwards in golden light, a jungle in which forms had no time to harden into matter; and before the vision could be taken from me I pushed on into it, past the maid, through the door, down the passage whose terminal window faced my own, to where, on the left, another door stood open and the scent of flowers met me as I went through—met me and strengthened, and then I saw the flowers and the waving stems: they were banked up inside the open window, almost hiding it, keeping out the view, the view of me, keeping out what remained of the light, or I should have seen, much sooner than I did see, for the shadows of the leaves were playing on it and there was no other movement—the bed and the face on the pillow.’

My friend stopped and passed his hand across his face, whether to keep his mind’s eye clear for its inner vision or to brush the vision aside I could not tell: and then, perhaps with the same intention, whichever it was, he closed and unclosed his eyes.

‘Is that all?’ I asked at length.

‘No, it isn’t all,’ he said. ‘How kind of you to have listened to me for so long, Arthur! It isn’t all, but it’s all that I feel I can tell—not because the rest’s too private, though it is private, but because I can’t—oh well—externalize it. What happened before, belonged to me; what happened afterwards, belonged to us: it was shared , that was the point of it. You can’t say much about sharing, can you? Not to convey its meaning?’

I agreed.

‘I suppose that’s what I had been wanting all along,’ he went on, ‘to share something, and I did, we did—when I say I, I mean we. It all boiled down to that. I suppose I could tell you, but do you want to hear? Isn’t there something rather putting off . . . unattractive . . . in the spectacle of somebody’s meaning so much to someone else? Isn’t it rather like watching a dog with a bone? You can tolerate it perhaps, but you can’t like it. Besides . . .’

‘Yes?’ I prompted him.

‘Well, I’ve never told anyone. I never meant to tell anyone. But when I’ve got as far as this, I might as well go on. But you will think badly of me. I’m sure you will. You think badly of me already.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Why do you keep imputing to me feelings I don’t have?’

He frowned at my smile. ‘Yes, but you will. Anyone would, and I couldn’t bear that. Because at the time it seemed . . . well, perfect is a weak word for it. We haven’t seen each other of late years, you and I, but you know enough of me and I’ve told you enough to know what small hopes I’ve ever had of obtaining perfection in my own experience. And it’s the same with me now—a confirmed mental habit is so much stronger than the exception that breaks it. When I look back on that time, it’s as if I was a plain-dweller—old and’—he looked at me and flushed—‘and well, decrepit, looking up at a snow-capped mountain which he can hardly believe that he once climbed.’

‘All the more credit to him for having climbed it once,’ I said. ‘He should be proud of that.’

My friend shook his head.

‘I told you of my fancy of the archway, didn’t I?’ he said, ‘and of the indeterminate springing greenness in between where there were no facts but just the raw material of facts, the inchoate substance of experience before it becomes one’s own, well, in her room it was always there—the symbol and the thing itself, you see what I mean? Afterwards she used to have it dismantled so that we could see each other across the canal; but when I came back she would have it rearranged so that there was no need of blinds, but they don’t go in for blinds in Venice—or shutters or anything to keep us to ourselves.’

‘So you didn’t leave Venice?’ I said. You stayed on?’

‘Yes, that was one of the facts,’ he said, ‘that at the time seemed so unimportant—I hardly remember how I arranged it. I had Antonio’s money, you see. But in her room, there were no facts beside ourselves, everything was beginning, and it began afresh each time I saw her—for her as well as me, I know that, because we said to each other everything we’d been wanting to say all our lives. She was much younger than I was, but that didn’t seem a fact, either. I don’t speak Italian well, but do you know I was never once at a loss for a word—and I said things that I couldn’t ever have said in English. I expect that was part of the enchantment: in another language I was another person.’

‘But isn’t all this rather lovely to look back on?’ I said. ‘It sounds as if it must be. So why——?’

‘Yes,’ he interrupted me, his brow clouding again, ‘it is, in a way because in memory I can go back, but only sometimes, only as just, now, when I feel a sympathy outside myself that helps me—it’s never come from a human being before—then I can remember what I want to remember, without the rest.

‘In July the weather got much hotter—we were quite light-headed sometimes—yet I never felt the heat oppressive, never an enemy. I don’t think I could have conceived the idea of an enemy in all that time.’

‘Was there one?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes there was, Adele, the maid. Perhaps I ought not to call her an enemy: she only acted according to her lights. But she was jealous of me, or she wouldn’t have done what she did, or not the way she did it. I couldn’t have told: those Italian peasant women are so secret: she seemed only to want our happiness. How much that depended on her contriving, I never knew: I took it all for granted; my unobserved entrances and exits, and the untroubled hours between. I think I was quite a favourite with the portinaia of the palace: she always greeted me with a smile. She may have guessed why I came so often: perhaps any Italian would have guessed. But there were so many people going to and fro in the entrata and on the staircases, I seldom saw the same face twice. But I never looked much. The moment I was inside the building one thought possessed me. You know how wonderful that can be, Arthur, it’s the only thing that matters, so long as it’s the right thought. Everything else is a kind of stationariness that one shares with chairs and tables, the sense of being a fixture, imprisoned in oneself, never to alter, never to escape from the mould in which one has been cast. But then I had the freedom of a myriad existences, every day a change, a new growth, a new flower, like the plants in the window. And it wasn’t egotism, for I have never felt less self-sufficient; indeed, I was so dependent on the thought of her that if it had been taken away I think I should have literally fallen over.’