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

‘Who asked you to touch that coat?’ said he. ‘It’s mine.’

In spite of my surprise I managed to stammer, ‘Oh, is it? Then I wonder if you would very much mind giving me a cigarette? I usually smoke one after bathing.’ I heard my voice trailing away into uncertainty under the look of his eyes.

‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘it ain’t no——good. I’ve taken a fancy to these clothes, and if you want any you can have mine.’

I was relieved to hear him swear, it made him more human. His madness, too, if such it were, had method in it; but I was not reassured. Sweet reasonableness, I felt, was the line to adopt.

‘I’m afraid your clothes wouldn’t be much use to me,’ I remarked. ‘Mind, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with them. They look very good wearing, and mine aren’t that, as you’ll find, I fear.’ I stopped, once more on a note of futility; his scornful, indifferent eyes held a message that I was beginning dimly to understand.

‘You’d like them back, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes, I should,’ I exclaimed in exasperation; but I could have bitten my tongue off when I saw the look of grim satisfaction—the only expression he had yet worn to which you could give a name—cross his face and die away. He said very quietly:

‘That’s how it is, is it? Then don’t you think you’d better try and get hold of them?’

At last, through his elementary sarcasm, the immitigable hostility of his tone, the carefully maintained purposelessness of his outrageous behaviour, I saw his drift; I was up to his little game. He aimed at compassing my complete humiliation, my unconditional surrender to his mastery of the situation. He expected me to go down on my knees, to grovel, to display all the interesting symptoms of moral and physical collapse. He was more subtle than I could have supposed.

I began to feel very cold—faint, too, and a little hysterical. Clouds had darkened the sky and lowered it. My sense of the reality of the situation and of the circumstances that had led up to it was lost; and in its place came a consciousness that I had reached an impasse, a cul-de-sac against which thought continually hurled itself, only to fall away bruised. Small practical movements lost their intention and faltered into meaningless gestures. To convince myself that I retained the use of my limbs I jumped to my feet. The man also rose; and his rising was a fine affair, artistically considered; I was able to reflect that my trousers had never assumed perpendicularity with so much dignity, or participated in such a striking cumulative effect. Any hope I might have cherished of forcibly recovering these garments fell from me. Their possessor’s eyes followed mine round the horizon.

‘No, you don’t,’ he said.

I didn’t, nor, as he might have seen, was I in any condition to; but the formulation of this magnificent comprehensive negative riveted, so to speak, my fetters. He came a step nearer.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you can have this nice suit of yours back if——’ He lingered on the protasis like a schoolboy afraid of putting the verb in the wrong tense. To give the consonant full play his lips curved back, exposing his teeth, and his eyes, under the stress of unwonted mental exertion, narrowed nearly to slits, preserving long after his lips had abandoned it the sense, almost the sound, of that suppressed condition. I was wondering what fantastic form his proposal would take when suddenly he burst out laughing, slapped me a terrific blow on the shoulder and subsided on the ground convulsed with merriment. Somehow I fancied his heartiness was not wholly genuine. Presently he remarked:

‘You can have them now; I’ve kept them aired for you.’ An incredible peevishness, the result, I suppose, of reaction, seized me.

‘I don’t think I want to wear them after you,’ I said; but instead of the outburst I expected he only remarked:

‘Why the hell not? One man’s legs are as good as another’s.’

Without a word and as though for ocular proof of his assertion he thrust those limbs in front of me, half leaning on his back and half supporting himself with his hands. My trousers sagged round his ankles in an imperfect ellipse. Suddenly, as if impelled by an exterior force, I seized the garment and began to draw it off; but he held on to it with one hand from the other end, shouting ‘pull’ and roaring with laughter.

What have I done? I thought, as the trousers, released at last, gave a little spring into my hands. It struck me that they were none the worse for being a bit stretched. The man, who had relapsed into something more than his former gloom, was dressing with swift precision like a play-goer anxious to get away before the National Anthem.

Why had I undertaken to act as this creature’s valet? My recovered garments were infinitely distasteful to me. Just because he would not be at the trouble to remove them himself I, I the injured party, the rightful owner, had stooped to that degrading office. It had been the culmination, the outward visible sign, of my abasement. He had not even asked me to do it. I had nothing to fear. He had withdrawn his foolish condition, he had ‘shown friendly’ after his uncouth manner, as my stinging shoulder still testified. He was just a high-spirited Briton, addicted, perhaps regrettably, to horseplay; and I, incredibly infatuated that I was, had made him a gratuitous offering of my self-respect. Why, I ought to have chucked him into the river and then argued with him from the bank. . . . His voice fell like a sword on the promising infant, my self-esteem.

‘Why don’t you get dressed instead of sitting there like the Light of Nature?’

I made no reply.

He took a step forward to adjust round his knee that traditional, much-affected encumbrance called, I believe, ‘York to London.’ The movement brought his face close to mine.

‘So you did it after all,’ said he.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Why, pulled them——trousers of yours off my legs,’ he explicitly replied, adding, with a preposterous straining after cultured pronunciation, ‘ ’Orace, I shall require my shaving water early to-morrow!’

That, then, was his suppressed condition—and I had complied with it.

‘For Witheling End?’ asked my porter, his hand hovering over the glue-pot.

It is no longer to the people that one must go for traditional vulgarities of pronunciation. ‘Willing End,’ I commented. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘This line is run for the convenience of intending passengers and boneafied travellers,’ remarked the porter, friendly but ironical. ‘Think it over. You’re not obliged. You needn’t go if you don’t want.’

Under the fierce assault of his brush the captive, peace-loving glue almost foamed in its agony.

‘Ah,’ I sighed, ‘you don’t know.’

Nor for that matter, I thought, as the train drew out of the dusky station, did I. Not yet. Logically, of course, it made no difference whether I stayed or went. It was the fact of the invitation that counted; the fact of its having, so menacingly, so—there was no burking it—disastrously come to hand. Just a week ago Oswald Clayton had been one of my most cherished friends. And now what was he? An enemy? Well, scarcely anything so personal as that. The others hadn’t, as their turns came, regarded him as an enemy. On the contrary, they had no dealings with him, they hardly ever mentioned him. They acquiesced in, they almost connived at, their own ostracism. And one and all, when pressed to give an account of what had passed, they refused—betrayed uneasiness and turned the question off. Or they would hide their hurt behind a show of pride. ‘Of course, a man with so many friends—he must grow tired of them.’ And secure in Oswald’s friendship one had considered, critically, the smarting cast-off, unattractive like all men with a grievance, and thought ‘Oswald knows his own business best.’