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

It was odd that he should have chosen this particular method of conveying to his friends that their affection had become otiose. In other people’s houses, in one’s own house, he might be met without the slightest risk. Risk! With pleasure always, that rare pleasure that his off-handedness, his plain-speaking, his genius for being amused at one’s expense, never failed to give. With his capacity for enjoyment (call it selfishness, now perhaps) he kindled the host in one as nobody else could. In fact the great privilege he conferred was the privilege of waiting on him hand and foot. He awoke in his friends a quite ravenous desire to please; not a repressive, conscientious self-effacement, but an active response to his needs, captious and exacting as they often were. His needs weren’t material, he wasn’t a common cadger, but he couldn’t escape (I searched for a harsh term) the charge of being an emotional adventurer. Given leave, he would open up for one new fields of consciousness; he was the self-appointed prospector, he held the concession. But it was you who worked the field, did the digging and turned up the lumps of ore. His feeling for a relationship, his view of it to himself, happily stopped short of, didn’t include the crucial fact that it was he who made the wheels go round. He thought or pretended to think, in any encounter, that he had stumbled across a little hive of happiness which had buzzed as gaily before he came as it would after he went away. In reality, both before and after, in as far as it buzzed at all, it buzzed to a very different tune. But while he was there, perching and flitting and settling in his agreeable way, his ingenuousness, his irresponsibility carried all before them. He affected to be amazed at the worldly wisdom of his friends; he declared that they were so many serpents, masquerading as doves, and threw himself on the mercy which they unstintingly provided. He only asked to be excused, permitted, taken care of.

Rather mournfully I made out for myself this inventory of his qualities, for, first-hand at any rate, I was to know them no more. It was to be for me his obituary notice, and I flattered myself that in this sad task I had shown both charity and discrimination; it would be the balsam of his memory, the entelecheia and soul of his subsistence. For I was certainly discarded. Of the half dozen or so who had spent those fatal week-ends at Witheling End, none had survived, none had told the tale. It had become a commonplace among us, the significance of an invitation to Oswald’s home. It was a death warrant, and its probable incidence was the subject of jokes and even bets among the almost decimated battalion of his friends. And now the blow had fallen upon me.

What, after all, I asked myself while the train thundered remorselessly on, could Oswald do to enforce an estrangement? For it was to be an estrangement on both sides. Otherwise my predecessors in exile, granted that they were committed to keeping up appearances, must have made some slips. News would have leaked through of overtures, tentative essays in reconciliation that Oswald had sternly repelled. And they were not men to take a slight lying down. If they hadn’t been proud before, the distinction of Oswald’s friendship had lent them pride, and the inflation was theirs to keep. Oswald’s tardy application of the pin would only have induced a new inflammation, flushed with anger against him and discharging venom. His creatures would have rounded upon him with all the weight of their derived, threatened importances. But—it came back to me again—they had done nothing of the kind. They had been content to watch their power, their glory pass without lifting a finger. They hadn’t even permitted themselves the exquisite revenge, such was their pious resignation, of turning the other cheek. They seemed to have taken counsel of Desdemona’s meekness; they approved of Oswald’s scorn, they wouldn’t hear of having him blamed.

Well, I was not so easily to be set aside. If Oswald meant to jettison me, he should have his work cut out. What, I wondered, would be his line of action? And when I considered the almost unlimited power to bore, embarrass and terrify which any host has at his command, I quailed. But, in justice to Oswald, I had to admit that his arsenal wouldn’t be stocked with ordinary instruments of torture. He wouldn’t spring upon me, my first evening, an obligatory charade which I should have to attend in some improvised costume—as a tinker perhaps, tricked out in domestic utensils, hung with saucepans, scoured, polished and sound beyond hope of dint or flaw. It was unlikely that I should be called upon to conceal my identity or exhibit a false one, with the implication that I was only tolerable in the likeness of somebody else. But there were other disguises, I pondered, less palpable and at first blush less disconcerting; but not less obligatory and far more exacting. False impressions, for instance. Oswald wouldn’t launch me as a renowned arctic explorer, but he might convey, by a mere inflection of the voice, that I was something other than I really was, something I might love or loathe to be, it made no difference. I should be committed. Or he might put me to a severer test—the crucible of the haunted room. The reticence shown by his friends, indeed, argued some exposure of this kind. Coaxed, beguiled, flattered, browbeaten, perhaps bribed, they had undergone an experience which, for its very horror, they must for ever keep to themselves. And it needn’t be a horror, I thought, that disclosed itself locally, that was charted, so to speak, and set and timed. That was the snare that was laid vainly in the sight of any bird. But supposing it was something strange in the character of my host, some baseness of fibre, some odious moral lapse or relaxation which he awaited in seclusion and the secret of which he imparted to his friends? Suppose my arrival were to chime with a (to him) calculable outbreak in some awful periodicity, whose convenient punctual eruptions he had cynically harnessed to his own ends—the incineration of spare acquaintances? Picking my way and holding my nose against the unsavoury conditions of my inquiry, I went a step farther. Lycanthropy lifted its head. Oswald might break the thread of conversation by becoming a wolf, furry on the outside, or, more horribly and incurably (for the malady had two forms) furry on the inside. Before such an object the most established affection might pardonably falter. By the time I reached the main-line station which boasted, as the least of its importances, that of being the junction for Witheling End, I had given up expecting to find in Oswald even the scarred outline of a human trait. He loomed before me the hero of some Near Eastern legend—marauding, predatory, fatal.

But the necessity to alight and pace the platform, to stand sentinel, unchallenged and ignored, by the luggage van, to stow away my things in the dirty branch-line carriage, to go through the routine, the mill, one might say, of ‘changing’, this prosaic occupation brought my thoughts to earth. Sadness succeeded terror. Of course, Oswald wouldn’t need to call upon the resources of demonology for my eviction; he could dismiss me without that, as he had dismissed the others. If anyone practised black magic it would be I the following Monday, the day after to-morrow, the first day of my registered recognized exile. I might be excused if, to beguile my disconsolate homecoming, I stuck imaginary pins into his wasting receding image. However flattering the portent to my self-esteem, I needn’t fear that merely out of sympathy with my eclipse the sun would turn into darkness, and the moon into blood. It wouldn’t be necessary to mount me on a horse to reveal my poverty in deportment to the gaping ‘county’. I could display unorthodoxy without being exposed by an archbishop; self-consciousness without the stimulus of a game of forfeits. What shortcoming was there, what social inadequacy or private self-sufficiency, I thought, with melancholy candour, that I couldn’t show, and that without the least external help—without malicious arrangements of background, or predicaments contrived for my downfall? I had no aptitude for ‘social surf-riding’. Oswald’s victory over me, if it consisted in a demonstration of my unfitness and unworthiness, needn’t be costly, needn’t be in the least Pyrrhic. I was shy-flowering, not all hardy or perennial; a hot-house plant, I told myself, with a flamboyant impulse, that would thrive only in a tepid air. It would be enough to turn off the heat and shut out the sun. And that would be his line. A perfunctory welcome would be followed by an evening’s bridge—that game which, however listlessly played, throws over everyone the chill of its formality or brings out the surly side. Then, next morning, a dyspeptic and disorderly application to the Sunday papers, the interchange of spare sheets over a strewn untidy floor, the interchange too, of promiscuous tit-bits, scandalous items, in lieu of conversation. Then the bleak three-quarters of an hour before luncheon. . . . Why, that was the very entertainment I had given Oswald himself at our last meeting. I had been too preoccupied to let his careless good spirits have their way with me. Well, he would get his own back. And what plea could I urge, what declaration could I make to compound for my bad manners? There was nothing left me but my determination, under however many affronts and provocations, never on my side to let go, but be torn, protesting faithfulness, from the very horns of Friendship’s altar.