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

‘Will you, won’t you?’ Well, I wouldn’t. I would refuse.

Daylight saw the ebb of my Dutch courage. It had receded infinitely far, leaving a barren strand. All day I waited for the tide to turn. On the horizon of my mind (never very distant, now stuffily close) I wrote the charmed word in letters of scarlet: refuse.

There seemed to be an opening at Clum. Among its treasures was a large squat perpendicular window, ribbed and tight-laced with massive angular tracery. Its forbidding aspect, presented successively to shrinking centuries, had kept injurious Time in awe. Oswald led me to a green knoll, which had a local reputation as a vantage-point from which this monster could be all too clearly seen. There it stood, or rather it didn’t stand, it came ‘at’ you, secure in its harsh virginity, unmarried and unmarred, one of survival’s most palpable mistakes. But Oswald invited my admiration; and I nearly withheld it. I hated to hear him speak with the voice if not with the accent (and that made it so much worse) of every tasteless tripper. And it wasn’t his voice; it was the voice that for the sake of safety, for the sake of maintaining the straddled flat-footed poise of the vulgar, he felt compelled to use to me. He wouldn’t be thrown off his balance; he would bring home to me, by the persistence with which he applauded the second-rate and took refuge, for opinion, in the second-hand, the fact that I ceased to count. How could I, with any feeling for my own dignity, challenge his impersonality? I should only succeed in being rude. It was the triumph of his policy to have brought our friendship to a pass where rudeness and disagreement were synonymous.

But I didn’t give up hope. I remembered my resolve; and though to my inspection the altar of friendship appeared as cold, as foreign to sacramental rites as Clum itself, I would still cling to it, though no one should take enough interest to pull me off it. All swabbed and scraped and slippery as it was, I couldn’t help thinking that an acolyte had lately been at work upon it, removing vestiges of former feasts. For though swept it wasn’t garnished, even with a vegetable marrow. It had an air of dereliction, I noted maliciously, not of preparation. The manger might be empty, but I was the only dog in the manger; it wasn’t coldly furnished forth with viands ear-marked for the next mongrel, denied to me. Oswald didn’t readily discuss our common friends, though after dinner I tried to draw him, by dangling names, into this, often the most rewarding of all forms of conversation. Perhaps it was snobbery; he wouldn’t rise to the minnows with which my poor line was forlornly baited. I had resolved not to change the direction of my attack, but to intensify it—to meet his most frigid propositions with passionate agreement, to glut his devouring sense of responsibility with continual titbits. Zealous as I was, he easily outstripped me in the competition for conferring favours. He looked all his own gift-horses in the mouth, before he presented them, whereas I was too apt to make mine show their paces, too raw not to recommend them. I felt as the evening drew on that something was sure to happen, some outburst, probably physical. He would scream, or I should. We were playing picquet and I had won the second partie.

‘I’m terribly afraid you’re rubiconed,’ I said, adding up the score for the third time.

‘Well,’ he replied, glancing sidelong at my figures, ‘I shall hope to do the same by you before the evening’s out.’

Hope stirred in me. Was there to be a show-down? His words had an ominous ring: last night we had been more jubilant under defeat.

‘I shall not grudge you the last laugh,’ I said, looking at him hard.

He laughed then, and rather bitterly, I thought.

‘It will be a new experience for me.’

‘Oh, surely,’ I protested. In vision I saw a series of week-end campaigns, lightning successes without a check; I saw too the casualties privately wringing their hands.

‘You held all the cards,’ he said, still a little resentful.

‘Oh, did I?’ I replied, and added, ‘But it was my misfortune. I’m so sorry.’

He took up the cards.

‘Should we cut?’

‘I think we might.’

‘After you, then.’

At length, all preliminary conditions satisfied, the game once more got under way.

‘And I’ve a quatorze of Kings, the whole phalanx,’ I heard my host say. It was the coup-de-grâce . I was ‘repiqued’.

‘Ninety-five,’ he announced.

‘Nothing.’

‘Ninety-six.’

‘Nothing.’

He played the cards almost vindictively, winning all the tricks and ‘capotting’ me. Again I noticed in his tone signs of excitement and satisfaction that were a betrayal of our code. We had taken our triumphs sadly.

‘With forty that makes you a hundred and forty-six,’ I said, ‘and nothing for me, poor me.’ I felt that, in view of his elation, I was entitled to a syllable of self-pity.

‘You’ve forgotten the last trick,’ he reminded me. ‘I had to work for it. That’s a hundred and forty-seven, please. And why “poor you”?’

I was still smarting under the ‘please’, trying to explain it away as ironical, when he repeated the question.

‘Why “poor you”?’

I really had to think. It would have been much easier simply to be annoyed.

‘Because I got nothing, I suppose,’ I said lamely. I thought it a sufficient explanation for a casual word, and even remarkably good-tempered. But it had an unsettling effect on Oswald. He rose and went to the fireplace.

‘But you have everything!’ he brought out at last. ‘Everything!’

Like a bankrupt and with the unenviable sensations of a bankrupt, I went over my meagre property, personal and real. The only considerable asset I had appeared to be my investment, my shares in the ‘concern’ that was Oswald—and then I was going to lose, had already lost. He couldn’t possibly—it was too heartless, be poking fun at my imminent destitution. He couldn’t seriously mean me to give him a financial statement—an outline of my ‘circumstances’. That they were straitened was common property—the only sort of property, in fact, in which they at all generously abounded. Judged by any standard the disparity in our fortunes was tremendous and the advantages all his. It was my luck with the cards, I decided, that had set growling the green-eyed monster, which must have slumbered since its owner’s childhood. And this was a childish outburst, a childish solecism which I would overlook.

‘I’ve been horribly lucky,’ I said, looking up at him. ‘I’ve won all along the line. And I won last night too.’

I had, a paltry hundred.

He laughed and returned to his chair.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did. But I wasn’t meaning that.’ His face narrowed over the cards.

What, then, did he mean? I longed to ask; and last night, fortified by toddy, perhaps I could have asked. But the interval had choked that weakling, our intimacy, beneath a jungle of misunderstanding and constraint. I could no more ask the question than an actor could show himself aware of a conventional aside spoken well within his hearing. And if the saving mood failed me then, the next morning at breakfast, a breakfast that looked so earnestly into the future that it seemed to have outrun the present and be taking place at the station or even in the train—this mood had faded into the shadow of a dream. I had ceased to take pains, ceased even to cling. I suppose I cut an awkward figure, realizing that if I didn’t stand on my dignity I didn’t stand at all. And it was from this pedestal, and not from the horns of Friendship’s altar, that I waved Oswald Clayton good bye.

As far as London allowed of it, I passed the week that followed my visit to Witheling End in seclusion. There was little to distract me. The cheerful or distinguished gatherings in which, as Oswald’s familiar, I had been welcome were closed to me; and I hadn’t the heart to ogle the other scarecrows of older standing, with which Oswald’s waste ground had been so thickly planted. Dully I realized that outlets were stopped up; but even if I were robbed of motion, socially paralysed, I could still hug my immobility and postpone the moment when I too must flap and twirl for a warning to the rest. And so it was with sinking of the heart that I heard a bounding step on the stairs followed by a resounding voice. It was Ponting, the artist.