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

When her guests had gone she retired to her room, and sitting before the tarnished Venetian mirror which gave back a very subdued version of her dark, intelligent, aquiline, handsome face, she wrote a note: but first, as was her habit, she addressed the envelope:

Mrs. Stornway,

The Uplands,

Little Settlemarsh.

Most of her friends lived in Little Settlemarsh; she herself still inhabited that part of the town which had been fashionable thirty years earlier.

Dearest Eva (she wrote),

I cannot quite forgive you for not coming here to-day. You would have been so bored! but at any rate I should have had some amusement. Foremost among the bores was (dare I say it?) your foundling, Mrs. Pepperthwaite, or words to that effect—I forget the exact name and her card, if it ever reached me, has been mislaid. Among other subjects that she touched but did not adorn was Mr. Blandfoot and his picture, gossip she had heard at Mrs. Peets’s. Now do tell me, what is all this about. And another time don’t desert your poor distracted friend,

Next day brought an answer:

Dearest Alice,

A thousand apologies! I couldn’t come yesterday because I was expecting—who do you think? Mr. Blandfoot! He had proposed himself for that day, but he never turned up. He sent me quite a civil note saying he had been caught in a shower at the ninth hole, and had to take shelter, as he dare not risk getting wet. I wonder why: he looks quite a strong man. He has taken ‘Heather Patch’ at the bottom of our garden and is putting in some orange-and-blue curtains. More than that? and his golf, dearest, I simply do not know! I expect we shall all see the picture when his house is straight—I don’t suppose he has even hung it yet. Horace thinks it may be of the Dutch School, as Mr. Blandfoot is said to have been something in Java. I wish I could be more helpful, dearest.

Yours,

Such information as Mrs. Marling gleaned about the newcomer was always fragmentary and unsatisfactory. The days passed, and still the polite society of Settlemarsh awaited in vain a signal from its leader.

Meanwhile, there was no doubt of it, Mr. Blandfoot was making headway; he joined clubs, was a fugitive visitor at tea-parties, he went out in the evening and played bridge. In spite of Mrs. Marling’s withheld permission, he seemed to be establishing himself. To those in whom awe of Mrs. Marling was still as second nature, he seemed to go about with a furtive air, like a foreigner without a passport. At any moment, it was felt, some official, acting on her instructions, would come up and ask for his credentials. It was observed that Mrs. Marling’s immediate circle still held aloof, and Mrs. Stornway never repeated the indiscretion of inviting him to tea. But people began to ask themselves, was his case still sub judice ? Had Mrs. Marling rejected him, or had she not? And this uncertainty was new to Settlemarsh. For whatever else Mrs. Marling might be she was never indifferent, nor had she ever shirked the responsibility of saying yes or no. In this matter of maintaining the standard of Settlemarsh society her conscience and her honour were involved. Her inactivity was inexplicable.

More than that, it was dangerous; dangerous to Mrs. Marling, dangerous to Settlemarsh. There had always been rebellious provinces on the fringe of Mrs. Marling’s dominion, and these, as the central authority seemed to weaken, began to hold up their heads. Mrs. Peets had to order a new tea-service, so thronged was her table, and there were some who preferred its vigorous blue and yellow stripes to Mrs. Marling’s gold and white, just as there were some who preferred her house with its tiers of wooden balconies painted white to the Victorian exterior of The Grove. Everyone acknowledged that The Grove had been a good house in its day and for its time. But now even its habitués began to look at it with purged and critical eyes. They saw the brickwork, once yellow, now dingy with smoke, relieved by string-courses, also brick, of a hard, dark, metallic blue. They observed that the serviceable and decorative magnolias which swarmed the walls and were cut back (so Mrs. Peets said) to exhibit the blue-brick arabesque did not really conceal the scaffolding of drain-pipes with which Mrs. Marling’s grandfather, at the coming of the bathroom age, had fortified the walls. At Mrs. Peets’s you had air and light and virgin soil. But when you went to The Grove you were conscious that the trees from which it took its name, a respectable cluster, larger than a shrubbery but smaller than a spinney, were on their last legs, and that one was trying to do duty for two; that the soil was sour and impoverished and, like an old coat, looked the more threadbare for its careful raking and tending; that every shrub would be an elderberry if it could, every flower a lobelia, every fern an aspidistra.

‘And how many of them have had their wish!’ thought Mrs. Stornway, as she trod lightly over the earthy gravel of the drive, her eyes still dazzled by the remembrance of Mrs. Peets’s carriage sweep, a veritable shingle-bank for depth and glitter. Poor Alice! Sooner or later she had to become a back number. How could she hope to keep pace, Mrs. Stornway ruminated, as a blue-slated turret of vaguely ogee outline burst into view, with the growth of the town, the newcomers who gave you cocktails at tea, and whose baths filled in a moment, so fierce and sudden was the rush of water? How could she make herself felt, exert her authority over a society whose members dropped in casually on each other, who might as easily as not precede the servant into the drawing-room, whose very clothes had a different aim from hers? How easily people of to-day moved! Just as the whim took them, they got up, they sat down, they sprawled, lounged, and smoked; their conversation was short, sharp, and informal, familiar and pert. Mrs. Marling’s words, like her attitudes, were poured into a mould; they had no elasticity, no give-and-take! She had ruled, indeed, by getting people into her house and making them feel so strange, so tense, so awkward, so incapable of movement, that she could do anything she liked with them! She had no notion of how to make her guests feel relaxed and comfortable. ‘Poor Alice!’ thought Mrs. Stornway again. ‘The sap of her mind is dried up. She can’t absorb fresh subjects. Look how hide-bound she is about Mr. Blandfoot’s picture! She affects not to take any interest in it. I really must speak to her seriously!’

But as she confronted Mrs. Marling’s slightly ecclesiastical porch, smothered in soiled ivy and surmounted by crockets and finials, her brave thoughts began to change colour. And when, in response to her inquiry, the butler had gone to find out whether Mrs. Marling was in and Mrs. Stornway remembered that rarely as Mrs. Marling left her home, as rarely was she at it, those thoughts died completely. She waited; the sombre trophies from India and the Boxer Rebellion, scraps of armour without faces, scraps of faces without armour, pallid wooden hands projecting from hollow sleeves supporting flower pots, completed her discomfiture. She watched the butler returning from the far end of the long hall, his advancing figure silhouetted against a large window, enclosed in an oblong frame of stained glass. Till the man spoke, she could not tell, no one could have told, whether Mrs. Marling was at home or not. And as he conducted her towards the drawing-room, walking a little in front and a little to one side, he might have been taking one ghost to interview another.

At first Mrs. Marling did not seem to notice her visitor; she stretched her work out in front of her and peered over the edge in an abstracted fashion. Then suddenly she rose.

‘My dear Eva, to think of you coming all this way, and in this heat, to talk to a poor imbecile like me! I can tell you how flattered I feel. Nobody ever comes to see me now.’