Classic Audiobook Collection - Night Fears and Other Stories by L. P. Hartley ~ Full Audiobook [horror]

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Night Fears and Other Stories by L. P. Hartley audiobook. Genre: horror First published in May 1924, Night Fears and Other Stories gathers 17 early tales from L. P. Hartley that turn ordinary settings into stages for unease - where a polite conversation can feel like a trap, and a quiet room can seem to listen back. citeturn0search0 Across pieces such as 'Night Fears,' 'The Island,' 'The Telephone Call,' and 'St. George and the Dragon,' Hartley moves between subtle supernatural suggestion and razor-sharp social observation, tracing how dread can rise from the dark as easily as it can from manners, class, and the fear of misstep. citeturn0search13turn0search4 His characters - night wanderers, anxious callers, guests in unfamiliar houses, and people bracing for the ordinary indignities of modern life - find themselves confronted by sensations they cannot neatly explain, forced to decide what to dismiss, what to confess, and what to endure. citeturn0search4 Witty, poised, and quietly merciless, these stories invite you to listen for the moment a harmless detail turns ominous, and to discover how Hartley can make a single flicker of apprehension bloom into a lingering, sleepless afterthought. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:34:55) Chapter 02 (00:40:57) Chapter 03 (00:54:05) Chapter 04 (01:04:34) Chapter 05 (01:31:17) Chapter 06 (01:36:57) Chapter 07 (01:53:56) Chapter 08 (02:01:16) Chapter 09 (02:18:16) Chapter 10 (02:24:57) Chapter 11 (02:35:39) Chapter 12 (02:50:25) Chapter 13 (03:03:44) Chapter 14 (03:18:09) Chapter 15 (03:52:26) Chapter 16 (03:59:13) Chapter 17 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Section 1 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L. P. Hartley. Section 1. The Island How well I remember the summer aspect of Mrs. Santander's Island, and the gratefully deciduous trees among the pines of that countryside, coming down to the water's edge and over it. How their foliage, sloping to a shallow dome, sucked in the sunlight, giving it back all gray and green. The sea tossing and glancing, refracted the light from a million spummy point,

points. The tawny sand glared, a monochrome unmitigated by shades, and the cliffs, always bare, seemed to have achieved an unparalleled nudity, every speck on their brown flanks, clamoring for recognition. Now every detail was blurred or lost. In the insufficient, ill-distributed November twilight, the island itself was invisible. Forms and outlines survive, but indistinctly in the memory. It was hard to believe that the spit of shingle on which I stood was the last bulwark of that huge discursive landlocked harbor, within whose meager mouth Mrs. Santander's seaborne territory seemed to ride at anchor. In the summer I pictured it as some crustacean,

swallowed by an ill-turned starfish, but unassimilated. How easy it had been to reach it in Mrs. Santander's gay plunging motorboat, and how inaccessible it seemed now, with the motorboat fallen, as she had written to tell me into wartime disuse, with a sea running high and so dark that, save for the transparent but scarcely luminous wave tips, it looked like an agitated solid. The howling of the wind and the oil skins in which he was encased

made it hard to attract the ferryman's attention. I shouted to him, Can you take me over to the island? No, I can't, said the ferryman, and pointed to the tumultuous waves in the harbor. What are you here for? I bawled. I tell you I must get across. I have to go back to France tomorrow.

In such circumstances, it was impossible to argue without heat. The ferryman turned, relenting a little. He asked querulously in the tone of one who must raise a difficulty at any cost. What if we both get drowned? What a fantastic objection. Nonsense, I said. There's no sea to speak of. Anyhow, I'll make it work through while.

The ferryman grunted at my unintentional pleasantry. Then as the landing stage was submerged by the exceptional, high tide, he carried me on his back to the boat, my feet trailing in the water. The man lurched at every step, for I was considerably heavier than he. But at last, way steep in water, he reached the boat and turned sideways for me to embark. How uncomfortable the whole business was. Why couldn't Mrs. Santander spend November in London like other people? Why was I so infatuated as to follow her here on the last night of my leave when I might have been lolling in the stalls of a theater? The craft was behaving oddly, rolling so much that at every other stroke one of the boatmen's attenuated seafaring oars would be left high and dry.

Once when we happened to be level with each other, I ask him the reason of Mrs. Santander's seclusion. At the top of his voice he replied, Why the do say should be lovesick, look out, he added, for we had reached the end of our short passage and were standing by in the surf, a few yards from the shore, waiting for an easy in the succession of breakers. but the ferryman misjudged it, just as the keel touched the steep shingle bank, a wave caught the boat, twisted it round and half over, and I lost my seat and rolled about in the bottom of the boat, getting very wet. How dark it was among the trees.

A cute physical discomfort had almost made me forget Mrs. Santander, but as I stumbled up the grassy slope, I longed to see her. She was not in the hall to welcome me. The butler discreetly noticing my condition, said, We will see about your things, sir. I was thankful to take them off, and I flung them about the floor of my bedroom. That huge apartment that would have been square but for the bow window built on to the end. The wind tore at this window, threatening to drive it in, but not a curtain moved.

Soundlessness, I remembered, was characteristic of the house. Indeed, I believe you might have screamed yourself hoarse in that room and not have been heard in the adjoining bathroom. The other I hastened and wallowed long and luxuriously in the marble bath. Deliberately I splashed the water over the side, simply to see it collected and marshaled away down the little grooves that unerringly received it. When I emerged, swathed in hot towels, I found my clothes already dried and pressed. Wonderful household. A feeling of unspeakable well-being descended upon me as five minutes before dinner-time I entered the drawing-room.

It was empty. What pains Mrs. Santender must be bestowing on her toilet. Was it becoming her chief asset? I wondered. Perished the thought. She had a hundred charms of movement. voice and expression, and yet she defied analysis. She was simply irresistible. How Santander, her impossible husband, could have retired to South America to nurse an injured pride, or, as he doubtless called it, an injured honor, passed my comprehension.

She had an art to make the most commonplace subject engaging. I remembered having once admired the lighting of the house. I had an odd fancy that it had a quality not found elsewhere, a kind of whiteness, a power of suggesting silence. It helped to give her house its peculiar hush. Yes, she had said, and it's all so simple. The sea makes it just by going in and out. A silly phrase, but her intonation made it linger in the memory like a charm. I sat at the piano and played.

There were some songs on the music rest, Wolf, full of strange chords and accidental, so that I couldn't be sure I was right. But they interested me and I felt so. happy that I failed to notice how the time was drawing on. Eight o'clock, and the dinner should have been at a quarter, too. Growing a little restless, I rose and walked up and down the room. One corner of it was in shadow, so I turned on all the lights. I had found it irritating to watch the regular expansion and shrinkage of my shadow. Now I could see everything, but I still felt constrained, sealed up in that

admirable room. It was always a shortcoming of mine not to be able to wait patiently, so I wandered into the dining room and almost thought, such as the power of overstrung anticipation, that I saw Mrs. Santander sitting at the head of the oval table. But it was only an effect of the candlelight. The two places were laid, hers and mine. The glasses with twisty stems were there. Such a number of glasses for the two of us. Suddenly I remembered I was smoking, and taking an almond I left the room to its four candles.

I peeped inside the library. It was in darkness, and I realized as I fumbled for the switch without being able to find it, that I was growing nervous. How ridiculous. Of course, Mrs. Santander wouldn't be in the library and in the dark. Abandoning the search for the switch, I returned to the drawing room. I vaguely expected to find it altered, and yet I had ceased to expect to see Mrs. Santander appear at any moment.

That always happens when one waits for a person who doesn't come. But there was an alteration in me. I couldn't find any satisfaction in struggling with Wolf. The music had lost its hold. So I drew a chair up to the China cabinet It had always charmed me with its figures of Chinaman Those white figures Conventional and stiff

But so smooth and luminous and significant I found myself wondering as often before Whether the ferocious pleasure in their expressions Was really the oriental artist's conception of unqualified good humor Or whether they were not, after all, rather cruel people And this disquieting topic aroused others that I had tried successfully to repress the exact connotation of my staying in the house as Mrs. Santander's guest, an unsporting little mouse playing when the cat was so undeniably, so effectually away.

To ease myself of these obstinate questionings, I leant forward to open the door of the cabinet, intending to distract myself by taking one of the figures into my hands. Suddenly I heard a sound and looked up. A man was standing in the middle of the room. I'm afraid the cabinet's locked, he said, In spite of my bewilderment something in his appearance struck me as odd. He was wearing a hat. It was a grey felt hat.

And he had an overcoat that was grey too. I hope you don't take me for a burglar, I said, trying to laugh. Oh, no, he replied. Not that. I thought his eyes were smiling, but his mouth was shadowed by a dark mustache. He was a handsome man, something in his face struck me as familiar. But it was not an unusual type, and I might easily have been mistaken. In the hurry of getting up, I knocked over a set of fire irons. The cabinet flinted the fireplace, and there was a tremendous clatter.

It alarmed and then revived me, but I had a curious feeling of defenselessness, as I scooped down to pick the fire irons up, and it was difficult to fix them into their absurd sockets. The man in gray watched my operations without moving. I began to resent his presence. Presently he moved and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his fingers to the warmth. We haven't been introduced, I said. No, he replied, we haven't. Then while I was growing troubled and exasperated by his behavior, he offered an explanation.

I'm the engineer, Mrs. Santander, calls in now and then to superintendent her electric plant. That's how I know my way about. She's so inventive and she doesn't like to take risks. He volunteered this. And I came in here in case any of the fittings needed adjustment. I see they don't. "'No,' I said, secretly reassured by the stranger's account of himself. "'But I wish—of course I speak without Mrs. Santander's authority.

"'I wish you'd have a look at the switches in the library. "'They're damned inconvenient. "'I was so pleased with myself for having compassed the expletive "'that I scarcely noticed how the engineer's fingers, "'still avid of warmth, suddenly became rigid. "'Oh, you've been in the library, have you?' he said. "'I replied that I had got no further than the door. But if you can wait, I added politely to the superior mechanic who liked to style himself an engineer,

Mrs. Santander will be here in a moment. You're expecting her? asked the mechanic. I'm staying in the house, I replied stiffly. The man was silent for several moments. I noticed the refinement in his face, the good cut of his clothes. I pondered upon the physical disability that made it impossible for him to join the army. She makes you comfortable here? He asked, and a physical disturbance.

sneezing or coughing, I suppose, seized him, for he took out his handkerchief and turned from me with all the instinct of good breeding. But I felt the question was one his station scarcely entitled him to make, and ignored it. He recovered himself. I'm afraid I can't wait, he said. I must be going home.

The wind is dropping. By the way, he added, we have a connection in London. I think I may say it's a good firm. If ever you want electric plant installed, I left a card somewhere. He searched for it vainly. Never mind, he said, with his hand on the door.

Mrs. Santander will give you all particulars. Indulgently, I waved my hand, and he was gone. A moment later, it seemed to me, that he wouldn't be able to cross to the mainland without notifying the ferryman. I rang the bell, the butler appeared. Mrs. Santander is very late, sir, he said. Yes, I replied, momentarily dismissing the question. But there's a man, a mechanic or something.

you probably know. The butler looked blank. Anyhow, I said, A man has been here attending to the lighting he wants to go home. Would you telephone the boatman to come and fetch him away? When the butler had gone to execute my order,

my former discomfort in unease returned. The adventure with the engineer had diverted my thoughts from Mrs. Santander. Why didn't she come? Perhaps she had fallen asleep dressing. It happened to women when they were having their hair brushed. Gertrude was imperious and difficult. her maid might be afraid to wake her.

Then I remembered her saying in her letter, I shall be an awful fright because I've had to give my maid the sack. It was funny how the colloquialisms jarred when you saw them in black and white. It was different when she was speaking. Just to hear her voice. Of course the loss of her maid would hinder her in account for some delay. Lucky maid I'm used confusedly to have her hair in your hands. Her image was all before me as I walked aimlessly about the room.

Half tranced with the delight of that evocation I stopped in front of a great bowl ornamented with dragons that stood on the piano. Half an hour ago I had studied its interior that depicted terracotta fish with magenta fin swimming among the conventional weeds. My glance idly sought the pattern again. It was partially covered by a little slip of paper.

Ah, the engineer's card. His London connection. Amusedly I turned it over to read the engineer's name. Mr. Maurice, send hinder. I started violently. The more that at the same moment there came a knock at the door. It was only the butler, but I was so bewildered I scarcely recognized him. Too well trained, perhaps, to appear to notice my distress. He delivered himself almost in a speech. We can't find any trace of the person you spoke of, sir. The ferryman's come across,

and he says there's no one at the landing stage. The gentleman, I said, has left this, and I thrust the card into the butler's hand. "'Why, that must be Mr. Santander,' "'the servant of Mr. Santander's wife at last brought out. "'Yes,' I replied, "'and I think perhaps it's getting late we ought to try and find Mrs. Santander. "'The dinner will be quite spoiled.' "'Telling the butler to wait, and not to alarm the servants,

"'I went alone to Gertrude's room. "'From the end of a long passage I saw the door standing partly open. "'I saw, too, that the room was in darkness. "'There was nothing strange in that, I told myself. But it would be methodical. It would save time to examine the intervening rooms first. Examine. What a misleading word. I banished it, and search came into my mind. I rejected that, too. As I explored the shuttered silences, I tried to find a formula that would amuse Gertrude, some facetious understatement of my agitated quest.

A little tour of inspection. She would like that. I could almost hear her say, so you expected to find me under a sofa. I wouldn't tell her that I had looked under the sofas unless to make a joke of it, something about dust left by the housemaid. I rose to my knees spreading my hands out in the white glow, not a speck. But wasn't conversation, conversation with Gertrude, made up of little half-truths, small forays and to fiction. With my hand on the door, it was of the last room and led on to the landing,

I rehearsed the pleasantry aloud. During the course of a little tour of inspection, Gertrude, I went from one dust heap to another, from dust unto dust I might almost say. This time I must overcome my unaccountable reluctance to enter her room. Screwing up my courage, I stepped into the passage, but for all my resolution I got no further. The door still stood, as I had first seen it, half open, but there was a light in the room, a rather subdued light, possibly from the standard lamp by the bed. I knocked and called Gertrude

And when there was no reply I pushed open the door It moved from right to left So as not to expose the bulk of the room Which lay on the left side It seemed a long time before I was fairly in I saw the embers of the fire The pale troubled lights of the mirror And vivid in the pool of light by the bed

A note It said Forgive me dearest I have had to go I can't explain why But we shall meet sometime All my love, G There was a little bit

no envelope, no direction, but the handwriting was hers and the informality characteristic of her. It was odd that the characters, shaky as they were, did not seem to have been written in haste. I was trying to account for this, trying to stem by an act of concentration the tide of disappointment that was sweeping over me, when a sudden metallic whir sounded in my ear. It was the telephone, the small subsidiary telephone that communicated with the servants' quarters. It will save their steps, she had said when I urged her to have it put in, and I remembered my pleasure in this evidence of consideration, for my own motives had been founded in convenience, and even in prudence. Now I loathed the black, shiny thing that buzzed so raucously and never moved, and what could the servants have to say to me except that Mr. Santander had, well, gone. What else was there for him to do? The instrument rang again, and I took up the receiver.

"'Yes?' "'Police, uh, dinner is served.' "'Dinner?' I echoed. It was nearly ten, but I had forgotten about that much postponed meal. "'Yes, sir. Didn't you give orders to have it ready immediately? "'For two, I think you said, sir.' The voice sounded matter-of-fact enough, "'but in my bewilderment I nearly lost all sense of what I was doing.

"'At last I managed to murmur in a voice that might have been anybody's—' "'Yes, of course, for two.' "'On second thoughts.' I left the telephone disconnected. I felt just then that I couldn't bear another summons. And though my course was clear, I did not know what to do next. My will had nothing but confusion to work with. In the dark, perhaps, I might collect myself.

But it didn't occur to me to turn out the light. Instead, I parted the heavy curtains that shut off the huge bow window, and drew them behind me. The rain was driving furiously against the double casements, but not a sound vouch for its energy. A moon shone at intervals, and by the light of one gleam, brighter than the rest, I saw a scrap of paper crushed up, lying in a corner.

I smoothed it out, glad to have employment for my fingers. But darkness descended on the alcove again, and I had to return to the room. In spite of its crumpled condition, I made out the note, easily indeed, for it was a copy of the one I had just read, or perhaps the original, but why should the same words have been written twice and even three times? not more plainly, for Gertrude never tried to write plainly, but with a deliberate illegibility.

There was only one other person besides Gertrude, I thought, while I stuffed the cartridges into my revolver, who could have written that note, and he was waiting for me downstairs. How would he look? How would he explain himself? This question occupied me to the exclusion of a more natural curiosity. My appearance, my explanation. They would have to be of the abruptest. Perhaps indeed they wouldn't be needed. There were a dozen corners, a dozen points of vantage, all well known to Mr. Santander, between me and the dining room door.

It came to me inconsequently that the crack of a shot in that house would make no more noise than the splintering of a toilet glass on my washing stand. And Mr. Santander, well-versed, no doubt, in South American revolutions, a phrase and shooting-ups, would be an adept in the guerrilla warfare to which military service hadn't accustomed to me. Wouldn't it be wiser, I thought irresolutely contemplating the absurd bulge in my dinner jacket, to leave him to his undisputed mastery of the situation, and not put it to the proof? It was not like cutting an ordinary engagement.

A knock on the door interrupted my confused consideration of social solacisms. Mr. Santanda told me to tell you he's quite ready, the butler said. Through his manifest uneasiness I detected a hint of disapproval. He looked at me askance. He had gone over, but couldn't he be put to some use? I had an idea. Perhaps you would announce me, I said. He couldn't very well refuse, and piloted by him I should have a better chance in the passages,

and an entry valuably disconcerting. I'm not personally known to Mr. Santander, I explained. It was save some little awkwardness. Close upon the heels of my human shield, I threaded the passages. The bright emptiness reassured me. It was inconceivable, I felt. after several safely negotiated turns that anything sinister could lurk behind those politely rounded corners.

Gertrude had had their angularities smoothed into curves. It would be so terrible, she said, if going to bed one stumbled, one easily might, and fell against an edge. But, innocuous as they were, I preferred to avoid them. The shortcut through the library would thus serve a double purpose, for it would let us in from an unexpected quarter, from that end of the library, in fact, where the large window, so perilous looking, really so secure on its struts and stays, perched over the roaring sea. This is the quickest way, I said to the butler pointing to the library door.

He turned the handle. It's locked, sir. Oh, well. We had reached the dining room at last. The butler paused with his hand on the knob as though by the mere sense of touch he could tell whether he were to be again denied admittance, or perhaps he was listening or just thinking. The next thing I knew was that he had called out my name and I was standing in the room. Then I heard Mr. Santander's voice,

You can go, Collins. The door shut. My host didn't turn round at once. All I can make out in the big dim room lighted only by its four candles and the discrete footlights of dusky pictures was his back in his face. The eyes and forehead reflected in the mirror of the mantelpiece. The same mirror showed my face. too, low down on the right-hand side, curiously unrelated. His arms were stretched along the mantelpiece,

and he was stirring the fire with his foot. Suddenly he turned and faced me. "'Oh, you're there,' he said. "'I'm so sorry.' We moved to the table and sat down. There was nothing to eat. I fell to studying his appearance. Every line of his dinner jacket, every fold in his soft shirt, I knew by heart. I seemed always to have known them. What are you waiting for? He suddenly demanded rather loudly. Collins, he called, Collins! His voice reverberated through the room, but no one came. How stupid of me, he muttered, of course, I must ring. Oddly enough, he seemed to look to me for confirmation. I nodded. Collins appeared, and the meal began. Its regular sequence soothed him, for presently he said,

You must forgive my being so distrait. I've had rather a tiring journey. come from a distance, as they say. South America, in fact. He drank some wine reflectively. I had one or two things to settle before. Before joining the army. Now I don't think it will be necessary. Necessary to settle them?

I said, no, he replied. I have settled them. You mean that you will claim exemption as an American citizen? Again, Mr. Santander shook his head. It would be a reason, wouldn't it? but I hadn't thought of that. Instinct urged me to let so delicate a topic drop. But my nerves were fearful of a return to silence.

There seemed so little of all that we had in common to draw upon for conversation. You suffer from bad health, perhaps, I suggested, but he demurred again. Even Gertrude didn't complain of my health, he said, adding quickly, as though to smother the sound of her name. But you're not drinking. I don't think I will. I stammered.

I had meant to say I was a teetotaler. My host seemed surprised. And yet Gertrude had a long bill at her wine merchants. He commented half to himself. I echoed it involuntarily. Had. Oh, he said, it's been paid. That's partly, he explained, why I came home to pay.

I felt I couldn't let this pass. Mr. Santander, I said, there's a great deal in your behavior that I don't begin. Is that good American, to understand? No, he murmured, looking straight in front of him. But I proceeded as truculently as I could. I want you to realize. He cut me short.

Don't suppose, he said, that I attribute all my wife's expenditure to you. I found myself trying to defend her. Of course, I said. She has the house to keep up. not run for a mere song, a house like this. And with my arm I tried to indicate to Mr. Santander, the costly immensity of his domain. You wouldn't like her to live in a pigsty, would you?

And there's the sea to keep out, why a night like this must do pounds worth of damage. You are right, he said with a strange look. You even underestimate the damage it has done. Of course, I couldn't fail to catch his meaning. He meant the havoc rotten his affections. They had been strong, report said, Strong enough for her neglect of them to make him leave the country.

They weren't expressed in half measures, I thought, Looking at him with a new sensation. He must have behaved with a high hand when he arrived. How he must have steeled himself to drive her out of the house that stormy night, ignoring her piteous protestations, her turns and twists, which I had never been able to ignore. She was never so alluring, never so fertile and emotional appeals, as when she knew she was in for a scolding.

I could hear her say, But Maurice, however much you hate me, you couldn't really want me to get wet. And his reply, Get out of this house, and don't come back till I send for you. As for your lover, leave me to look after him.

He was looking after me, and soon, no doubt, he would send for her. And for her sake, since he had really returned to take part in her life, I couldn't desire this estrangement. Couldn't I even bridge it over bring it to a close. Beauty pacifie.

Well, I would be a peacemaker, too. Confident that my noble impulses must have communicated themselves to my host, I looked up from my plate and searched his face for signs of abating rigor. I was disappointed. But should I forego or even postpone my atonement because he was stiff-necked? Only it was difficult to begin. At last I ventured. Gertrude is really very fond of you, you know.

Desert had been reached, and I, in token of amity and goodwill, had helped myself to a glass of port wine. For answer, he fairly glared at me. Fond of me! he shouted. I was determined not to be browbeaten out of my kind offices. That's what I said. She has a great heart. If you mean, he replied, returning to his former tone, that it has ample accommodation. But your recommendations come too late. I have delegated her affections.

To me? I asked involuntarily. He shook his head. And in any case, why to you? Because I... Oh, no! He exclaimed passionately. Did she deceive you?

Has she deceived you into believing that? That you are the alternative to me? You aren't unique. You have your reduplications, scores of them. My head swam, but he went on enjoying his triumph. Why no one has ever told me. me about you. She herself only mentioned you once. You are the least, the least of all her lovers. His voice dropped. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. Where should I be? I fatuously asked, but he went on

without regarding me. But I remember this house when it's silence, its comfort, its isolation, its uniqueness were for us, Gertrude and me, and for the people we invited. But we didn't ask many. We prefer to be alone, and I thought at first she was alone, he wound up. When I found her this evening. Then why? I asked. Did you send her away, and not me? Ah, he replied with an accent of finality. I wanted you. While he spoke, he was cracking a nut with his fingers,

and it must have had sharp edges, for he stopped wincing, and held the finger to his mouth. I've hurt my nail, he said. "'See?' He pushed his hand towards me over the polished table. I watched it fascinated, thinking it would stop, but still it came on, his body following, until if I hadn't drawn back it would have touched me, while his chin dropped to within an inch of the table,

and one side of his face was pillowed against his upper arm. "'It's a handicap, isn't it?' he said, watching me from under his brows. "'Indeed it is,' I replied, for the fine acorn-shaped nail was terribly torn, a jagged rent, revealing the quick, moist, and gelatinous. How did you manage to do that? I went on, trying not to look at the mutilation which he still held before my eyes. Do you really want to know how I did it?

He asked. He hadn't moved in his question, in its awkward, irregular delivery, seemed to reflect the sprawled, unnatural position of his body. "'Do tell me,' I said, and added nervously jocular. "'But first let me guess, perhaps you met with an accident in the course of your professional activities, when you were mending the lights, I mean, in the library.' At that he jumped to his feet. "'You're very warm,' he said.

"'You almost burn. But come into the library with me, and I'll tell you.' I prepared to follow him. But unaccountably he lingered, walked up and down a little, went to the fireplace, and again, it was evidently a favorite relaxation, gently kicked the coals. Then he went to the library door, meaning apparently to open it,

but he changed his mind and instead turned on the big lights of the dining room. Let's see what it's really like, he said. I hate this half-light. The sudden illumination laid bare that great rich still room, so secure, so assured, so content. My host stood looking at it.

He was fidgeting with his dinner, and had so little self-control that, at every brush of the material with his damaged finger, he whimpered like a child. His face, now that I saw it fairly again, was twisted and disfigured with misery. There wasn't one imaginable quality that he shared with his sumptuous possessions. In the library, darkness was absolute. My host preceded me, and in a moment I had lost all sense of even our relative positions. I backed against the wall, and by luck my groping fingers felt to switch, but its futile click only emphasized the darkness. I began to feel frightened with an acute immediate alarm, very different from my earlier

apprehensions and forebodings. To add to my uneasiness, my ears began to detect a sound, a small, irregular sound. It might have been water-dripping, yet it seemed too definitely consonantal for that. It was more like an inhuman whisper. Speak up, I cried. if you're talking to me. But it had no more effect, my petulant outcry, than if it had fallen on the ears of the dead.

The disquieting noise persisted, but another note had crept into it, a soft labial sound, like the licking of lips. It wasn't intelligible, it wasn't even articulate, yet I felt that if I listened longer it would become both. I couldn't bear the secret colloquy, and though it seemed to be taking place all around me,

I made a rush into what I took to be the middle of the room. I didn't get very far, however. A chair sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up, it was to the accompaniment of a more familiar sound. The curtains were being drawn apart in the moonlight, struggling in, showed me shapes of furniture in my own position,

a few feet from the door. It showed me something else, too. How could my host be drawing the curtains when I could see him lounging, relaxing and careless in an armchair that, from its position by the wall, missed the moon's director, Ray. I strained my eyes. Very relaxed, very careless, he must be, after what had passed between us, to stare at me so composedly over his shoulder. No more than that, over his very back.

He faced me, though his shoulder, oddly enough, was turned away. Perhaps he had practiced it, a contortionist trick to bewilder his friends. Suddenly, I heard his voice, not from the armchair at all, but from the window. Do you know now? What? I said. How I hurt my finger. No, I cried untruthfully, for that very moment all my fears told me. I did it, strangling my wife. I rushed towards the window, only to be driven back by what seemed a solid body of mingled sleet and wind.

I heard the creek of the great casement before it whirled outwards, crashing against the mullion and shattering the glass. But though I fought my way to the opening, I wasn't quick enough. Sixty feet below the eroding sea sucked, spouted, and roared. Out of it, jags of rock seemed to rise, float for a moment, and then be dragged under the foam. Time after time, great arcs of spray sprang hissing from the sea, lifted themselves to the window, as though impelled by an insatiable curiosity. condensed and fell away.

The drops were bitter on my lips, soaked to the skin and stiff with cold I turned to the room. The heavy brocade curtains flapped madly, arose and streamed level with the ceiling, and through the general uproar I could distinguish separate sounds, the clattering fall of small objects, and the banging and scraping of pictures against the walls. The whole weatherproof, soundproof house seemed to be ruining in,

to be given up to darkness and furies, and to me. But not wholly, not unreservedly, to me. Mrs. Santander was still at her place in the easy chair. End of Section 1, The Island. Section 2 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. The Slibervox recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker. Callant We had been talking about pasts,

and I ventured to remark that his had been full of promise. For a moment he appeared to consider it, and I added, incautiously forgetting the lapse of years since our old half-intimacy, We expected great things from you. As he still hung fire, I paused. The end of our colloquy was in sight, or I would not have struck the personal note so sharply. Already it was ceasing to vibrate,

had palpably missed forming a chord, when he said half-sullenly, As people talked, there was never anything really. Oh, come, I took him up, the sense of parting growing steadily upon me, the irresponsibility that licenses last words. I can't let you off so easily, why there was a poem of yours that created quite a furor. What was it called? I babbled on, arranging my scar for it was cold outside,

but he made no answering movement. It was part of his impracticability, I remembered to disdain the small aides, which, together with more important tyranny's custom has granted us to clothe the nakedness of action. "'Poor stuff, poor stuff,' he muttered, then added almost aggressively, "'Did you see anything in it?' "'Undoubtedly,' I replied in mock judicial tones. "'There were signs of no ordinary talent.

Only yesterday someone asked me what had happened to you, why you had given it all up.' While he stood irresolute, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, I had a most vivid impression of the room. The streaky distemper of an infinite variety of greens, the light too murky for brilliance and too glaring for shade, the dead patches and the gas mantles, like baleful sunspots stealthily extending their gangrenous edges. The corners devoid of mystery or restfulness, and frustrated it seemed in an everlasting attempt to achieve a right angle. But worst of all was the array of brass hooks on the wall, so long you had to turn your head to have them all in view. To me, they seemed innumerable, though doubtless the builder and contractor had kept within his prescribed limits.

Some multiple of twelve very likely. Dependent from one of these hooks, almost, but not quite, in the middle of the line, I saw my friend's coat. It was the only one there. His hat had slipped off, probably through his own carelessness in hanging it. But perhaps it was because the hooks were a trifle too small to fulfill their function, and lay sideways on the floor. My friend reached down for his hat, but almost at the bottom of the bend,

changed his mind, and, taking his coat, put it readily enough into my waiting hands. I helped him on with it. The coat had seen its best days. You know, he said a little awkwardly. It is often come into my mind. What you were speaking of just now,

I mean, the stuff I used to write. People often do that sort of thing, and then for one reason or another don't find. it up. Not that mine was ever any good. But yours was good, I insisted, and people who have made a hit usually don't like to sink back into obscurity, comparative obscurity, that is. This seemed to trouble him, for he drew a long breath that ended in a sigh. If it had been really good, I should have wanted to go on with it, he said, as though to convince himself. I looked over the cuttings, from the newspapers, you know, sometimes, but not very often.

One was written by a friend of mine. I think he persuaded the other papers to write favorably about me. There's a lot of that sort of thing in journalism, isn't there? I really did not know how to answer this appeal, and he continued almost warmly. I call it mistaken kindness. It does more harm than running a fellow down. Why, surely I ought to know myself. The only thing is that you are to be things were full of faults. Only last week I went through the whole lot with a red pencil. The pages were a pretty sight when I had finished with them, I can tell you. It took me a long time, but it was worth it. To know, I mean that the stuff was rubbish. I said to myself as I laid down the pencil, there's the death warrant to your literary reputation.

Now you needn't worry anymore. Worry, I echoed, mystified at the word, and at his rising excitement. He looked at me for a second or two most strangely. in an altered tone. Did I say worry? He asked. Well, the stuff wasn't any good, was it? Then, as I still remained silent, he laid his hand on my arm.

Say it wasn't, he said. I could think of nothing with the brass hooks, the inch-wide naples track that so inexorably emphasized the line of seam up his sleeve, the dust that must have collected in meaningless patterns on the underside of his hat. But I rose, yes, I rose to the, the occasion. No, I pronounced firmly, I thought almost all along that the reviewers, everyone, were mistaken. Your work attracted me at first, but there were no seeds of development in it, even if you had pursued it. I think you may take this from me. It wouldn't have lived.

It wouldn't have lived. He looked at me gratefully. Then, with a single free movement, most unlike his usual cramped style, he stooped down and picked down. up his hat. Quite unconcernedly, he flicked the dust from it, bade me goodbye, and vanished in the darkness. But some lines from a poem of his, lines, the whole poem, perhaps, lying lifeless under the interdict of his red pencil, kept ringing in my head. End of Section 2. Talent Section 3 Of Nightfears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley.

This Librevox recording is in the public, do. Rade by Ben Tucker. Night Fears The coat brazier was elegant enough, but the night watchman was not, consciously at any rate, sensitive to beauty of form. No, he valued the brazier primarily for its warmth.

He could not make up his mind whether he liked its light. Two days ago, when he first took on the job, he was inclined to suspect the light. It dazzled him, made a target of him, increased his helplessness. It emphasized the darkness. But tonight he was feeling reconciled to it, and aided by its dark clear rays, he explored his domain. A long narrow rectangle, fenced off from the road by poles round and thick as flagposts, and lashed loosely at the ends.

By day they seemed simply an obstacle to be straddled over, but at night they were boundaries, defenses almost. At their junctions, where the warning red lanterns dullly gleamed, they bristled like a barricade. the night watchman felt himself in charge of a fortress. He took a turn up and down, musing. Now that the strangeness of the position had worn off, he could think with less effort. The first night he had vaguely wished that the no thoroughfare board had faced him instead of staring uselessly up the street. It would have given his thoughts a rallying point. Now he scarcely noticed its blankness.

His thoughts were few but pleasant to dwell on, and in the solitude they had the intent. intensity of sensations. He arranged them in cycles, the rotation coming at the end of ten paces or so when he turned to go back over his tracks. He enjoyed the thought that held his mind for the moment, but always with some agreeable impatience for the next. If he surmised there would be a fresh development in it, he would deliberately refrain from calling it up, leave it fermenting and ripening, as it were, in a luxury of expectation. The night watchman was a domesticated man with a wife and two children, both babies. One was beginning to talk. Since he took on this job, wages had risen, and everything at home seemed guilt-edged. It made a difference to his wife. When he got home,

she would say, as she had done on the preceding mornings, well, you do look a wreck. This nightwork doesn't suit you, I'm sure. The night watchman liked being addressed in that way, and hearing his job described as night work. It showed an easy, competent familiarity with a man's occupation. He would tell her, with the air of one who had seen much, about the incidents of his vigil, and what he hadn't seen he would invent, just for the pleasure of hearing her say, Well, I never. You do have some experiences and no mistake. He was very fond of his wife. Why hadn't she promised to patch up the old blue paper blinds,

used once for the air raids, but somewhat out of repair as a consequence of their being employed as a quarry for paper to wrap up parcels? He hadn't slept well. couldn't get accustomed to sleeping by day. The room was so light. But these blinds would be just the thing, and it would be nice to see them and feel that the war was over, and there was no need for them, really. The night watchman yawned,

as for the twentieth time, perhaps, he came up sharp against the boundary of his walk, loss of sleep, perhaps. He would sit in his shelter and rest a bit. As he turned and saw the narrowing gleams that transformed the separating poles into thin lines of fire, he noticed that nearly at the end just opposite the brazier, in fact, and only a foot or two from the door of his hut.

The left line was broken. Someone was sitting on the barrier. His back turned on the night watchman's little compound. Strange, I never heard him come, thought the man, brought back with a jerk from his world of thoughts to the real world of darkness and the deserted street. Well, no, not exactly deserted, for here was someone who might be inclined to talk for half an hour or so. The stranger paid no attention to the watchman's slowly advancing tread. A little disconcerting.

He stopped. Drunk, I expect, he thought. This would be a real adventure to tell his wife. I told him I wasn't going to stand any rot from him. Now, my fine fellow, you go home to bed. That's the best place for you, I said. He had heard drunk men dressed in that way, and wondered doubtfully whether he would be able to catch the tone.

It was more important than the words, he reflected. At last, pulling himself together, he walked up to the brazier, and coughed loudly, and feeling ill at ease, set about warming his hands with such energy he nearly burned them. As the stranger took no notice, but continued to sit wrapped in thought, the night watchman hazarded a remark to his bent back. "'A fine night,' he said rather loudly, though it was ridiculous to raise one's voice in an empty street.

The stranger did not turn round. "'Yes,' he replied, "'but cold, it will be colder before morning.' The night watchman looked at his brazier, and it struck him that the coke was not lasting, so well as on the previous nights. I put some more on, he thought, picking up a shovel. But instead of the little heap he had expected to see,

there was nothing but dust and a few bits of grit. Its night supply had been somehow overlooked. Won't you turn round and warm your hands? He said to the person sitting on the barrier. The fire isn't very good, but I can't make it up, for they forgot to give me any extra, unless somebody pinched it when my back was turned. The night watchman was talking for effect.

He did not really believe anyone had to do. taken the coke. The stranger might have made a movement somewhere about the shoulders. Thank you, he said, but I prefer to warm my back. Funny idea that, thought the watchman. Have you noticed, proceeded the stranger, how easily men forget. This coke of yours, I mean, it looks as if they didn't care about you very much, leaving you in the cold like this. It had certainly grown colder, but the man replied cheerfully, oh, it wasn't that. They forgot it, hurrying to get home, you know. Still, they might have remembered, he thought.

It was Bill Jackson's turn to fetch it. Old Bill, as the fellows call him. He doesn't like me very much. The chaps are a bit standoffish. They'll be all right when I know them better. His visitor had not stirred. How I would like to push him off, the night watchman thought, irritated and somehow troubled.

The stranger's voice broke in upon his reflections. Do you like this job? "'Oh, not so bad,' said the man carelessly. "'Good money, you know.' "'Good money,' repeated the stranger scornfully. "'How much do you get?' The night watchman named the sum. "'Are you married, and have you got any children?'

The stranger persisted. The night watchman said yes without enthusiasm. "'Well, that won't go very far when the children are a bit older,' declared the stranger. "'Have you any prospect of a rise?' The man said no. He had just had one. "'Prices going up, too,' the stranger commented. "'A change came over the night watchman's outlook.

The feeling of hostility and unrest increased. He couldn't deny all this. He longed to say, what do you think you're getting at?' And rehearsed the phrase under his breath, but he couldn't get himself to utter it aloud. His visitor had created his present state of mind and was lord of it. Another picture floated before him, less rosy than the first,

an existence drab-colored with the dust of conflict, but relieved by the fateful support of his wife and children at home. After all, that's the life for a man, he thought. But he did not cherish the idea, did not walk up and down hugging it, as he cherished and hugged the other. Do you find it easy to sleep in the daytime? asked the stranger presently. Not very, the night watchman admitted. Ah, said the stranger. dreadful thing, insomnia. When you can't go to sleep, you mean, interpreted the night watchman, not without a secret pride.

Yes, came the answer. Makes a man ill, mad sometimes. People have done themselves in sooner than stand the torture. It was on the tip of the night watchman's tongue to mention that panacea, the blue blinds, but he thought it would sound foolish and wondered whether they would prove such a sovereign remedy after all. What about your children? You won't see much of them, remarked the stranger, while you are on this job. Why, they'll grow up without knowing you.

Up when their papa's in bed and in bed when he's up. Not that you miss them much, I dare say. Still, if children don't get fond of their father while they're young, they never will. Why didn't the night watchman take him up warmly, assuring him they were splendid kids? The oldest called him Daddy and the younger, his wife declared, already recognized him. She knew by its smile, she said. He couldn't have forgotten all that. Half an hour ago it had been one of his chief thoughts.

He was silent. I should try and find another job if I were you, observed the stranger. Otherwise you won't be able to make both ends meet. What will your wife say then? The man considered. At least he thought he was facing the question, but his mind was somehow too deeply disturbed

and circled warily and blindly in its misery. I was never brought up. up to a trade, he said hesitatingly. Father's fault. It struck him that he had never confessed that before, had sworn not to give his father away. What am I coming to, he thought. Then he made an effort. My wife's all right. She'll stick to me. He waited, positively dreading the stranger's next attack. Though the fire was burning low, almost obscured under the coke ashes that always seemed more lifeless than any others, he felt drops of perspiration on his forehead, and his clothes he knew were soaked. I shall get a chill. That'll be the next thing, he thought. But it was involuntary.

Such an idea hadn't occurred to him since he was a child, supposedly delicate. Yes, your wife, said the stranger at last, in tones so cold and clear that they seemed to fill the universe, to admit of no contradiction, to be graven with a fine, unerring instrument out of the hard rock of truth itself. You won't see much of her either. You leave her pretty much to her. You leave her pretty much to herself, don't you? Now with these women, you know, that's a risk. The last word rang like a challenge. But the night watchman had taken the offensive, shot his one little bolt, and the effort had left him more helpless than ever. When the eye doth not see, continued the stranger, the heart doth not grieve. On the contrary, it makes merry. He laughed as the night watchman

could see from the movement of his shoulders. I've known cases very similar to you. When the cat's away, you know. It's a pity you're under contract to finish this job. The night watchman had not mentioned a contract. But as you are, take my advice and get a friend to keep an eye on your house. Of course he won't be able to stay the night. Of course not. But tell him to keep his eyes open.

The stranger seemed to have said his say. His head drooped a little more. He might even be dropping off to sleep. Apparently he did not feel the cold, but the night watchman was breathing hard and could scarcely stand. He tottered a little way down his territory, wondering absurdly why the place looked so tidy, but what a travesty of his former progress,

and what a confusion in his thoughts, and what a thumping in his temples. Slowly from the writhing, tearing mass in his mind, a resolve shaped itself. Like a cuckoo it displaced all others. He loosened the red handkerchief that was knotted round his neck, without remembering whose fingers had tied it few hours before, or that it had been promoted, not without washing, to the status of a garment

from the menial function of carrying his lunch. It had been an extravagance, that tin carrier, much debated over, and justified finally by the rise in the night watchman's wages. He let the handkerchief drop as he fumbled for the knife in his pocket, but the blade, which was stiff, he got out with little difficulty, wondering vaguely if he would be able to do it, whether the right movement would come to him, why he hadn't practiced it, he took a step toward the brazier. It was the one friendly object on the street. Later in the night, the stranger, without putting his hands on the pole to steady himself, turned round for the first time and regarded the body of the night watchman.

He even stepped over into the little compound, and, remembering perhaps the dead man's invitation, stretched out his hands over the still warm ashes and the brazier. Then he climbed back and, crossing the street, entered a blind alley opposite, leaving a track of dark, irregular footprints. And since he did not return, it is probable that he lived there. End of Section 3, Night Fears. Section 4 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Read by Bin Tucker.

The telephone call. But for Phil Galbraiths. mismanagement of the lamp episode a painful situation would never have arisen. He would have ridden his bicycle home and arrived late, but not unreasonably late, for dinner. They would be keeping that meal hot for him, true. They would not yet have kept it hot, a more serious consideration. Try as he would, however, to make fate responsible for his detention in the small, inconvenient town of Netherside, a moral shortcoming, vaguer but no less regrettable than his failure to avert the lamp, forced itself into his orgy of self-justification.

He had willfully broken his engagement. It had been one of those engagements which are so easy to keep. There is no credit in keeping them. There is even impropriety, as though a man should shoot a sitting pheasant. By breaking them not only does one rise to a higher emotional plane, but one can simultaneously enjoy by a simple self-hypnotism, the righteous intention of keeping them. In his abasement, Philip Galbraith saw in his proper colors this illogical dual.

this paltry device to secure on earth multidimensional privileges which might be denied to the saints in heaven. Dilemmas are presented to us to keep our power of choice exercised and breathed. To be disrespectful to them, to refuse to recognize them, to make no distinction between their horns, is blasphemy, and avenges itself in a growing inaptitude for life. It had avenged itself, Philip felt, in the matter of the lamp. Then, if ever, had been the time for action. an action was precisely what Philip's mental habit that Janice debauched with facing both ways could never achieve.

From the first his visit to the Mirigolds, those wealthy bachelors, had been clouded by his powerlessness to take things as they came. It was true he had wanted to see their collections, but he desired still more to see himself among those collections. He had previously prepared and tasted a rather subtle emotional brew, compounded of several ingredients,

gently warring upon each other in the exquisite battlefield of Mr. Stephen Merigold's drawing-room. First himself, a little cultured, a little critical, gracefully appreciative of, but never rapturous over. The Morlins, the constables, the David Cox's, and the pedigree, Severus, China, which formed the second ingredient.

And thirdly, the contrast between Mr. Stephen Merigold's former calling, He had been a draper, and his object dart. But the experience, like the metaphor, had not quite come off. Perhaps the unmistakable qualities of his host, his tranquil possession, his technical knowledge, his frequent reticence, his unconsciousness of himself as showman, had impressed their flavor too strongly on the dish. It is certain that Philip, in his own opinion, a connoisseur and represented as such, was thrown off his balance by the discovery that the severas one cares about

is not turquoise but dark blue. His own part in the exhibition was slight and meretricious, a charlatan's. In the library, Mr. William Marigold's preserve, things were a trifle better. It was some consolation to know that a few of the ponderous, many-volumed histories were out of date. But Philip, to do him justice, was unwilling to dwell on this consolation. He was still regretting a betis committed on the very threshold of his host's treasure-house, Mr. Marigold had paused and let fall a quotation, an opposite quotation, current coin between literary men. Anyone but Philip would have been satisfied with recognizing it. It was awful to remember that he had paraded his knowledge of its source, the play, perhaps the act.

He shuddered and hoped not. And yet he took a melancholy pride in the knowledge that he was odious, a little despising people who, through introspective inability, were less sharply aware than they were odious to. Afterwards he had been captured by the enthusiasm of William Marigold, so unlike his brother's aloofness, his lively, full-hearted delight in showing his possessions, the incredible gusto with which he read some stanzas from the eve of St. Agnes, occasionally mistaking the rhythm but doing justice by his fervor not merely to the book, a first edition, but to the poet. But when the fading daylight scarcely served to distinguish the vivid colors of the missile he was

holding in his hand, Philip ought to have gone. The library had no other light but an oil lamp, and the ignition of oil lamps as he knew marked an epic. Switching on electric light has no significance, but an oil lamp has personality as well as radiance. Its victory over darkness is a personal triumph. Its wick may need attention. It may refuse to go. It may even explode. If knocked over, it makes or mars perpetually the reputation for resourcefulness of each member in a house hold. So Philip had no excuse. The exigent had come, but he allowed the lamp to be suggested, taken away, humored and fiddled about with, and finally brought back, held as carefully as a baby in the arms of the maid. Her face gleamed with pleasure as if it had really been one. If it was

justifiable that his family should be inconvenienced and held in suspense, it was not justifiable that they should be alarmed. Philip liked to drift into an emotional crisis, and thought that to avoid it by mere punctuality was cowardice. He relied on his conscience, that active umpire, to order the players off the field when the game had gone too far. He had not wanted to stay to dinner. The marigolds had not expected him, and probably, in spite of their pressing hospitality, did not want him.

Everything had come a little difficult. The angles of life were pushing aside their draperies, but a hint of discomfort was always necessary to Philip's piece of. mind. About half past nine he declared he must telephone home. His people would be worried and perhaps organized search parties. The Marigolds had no telephone and little idea of where to find one. Philip Galbraith, having brought the situation on himself, was very fertile in expedience for its solution, and as usual he abandoned the obvious course of telephoning from an inn in favor of the more thrilling experiments of invading a private house. But whose? There lay the difficulty. A doctor was

the obvious victim, and a large square doctor's house lay within a few yards of the marigolds. This doctor was not unknown to Philip, and would surely be ready to put his instrument at the disposal of a benighted traveler. Yes, too ready, Philip mused. Fifteen years ago, the doctor's son had been his best friend. The two were inseparable, in an offensive and defensive friendship. They had known each other from A to Z. They had lived each other's lives.

And they had drifted apart without rupture. It was not a clean break, but a moment. mortification by degrees. Sometimes factitiously stimulated with letters and meetings, their friendship had declined and died before their eyes. For years they had not met nor probably even given each other a thought. But the grave of this friendship was a monstrous mound, covering who knew what experiences and memories that, like atrophied nerves, would twist and twinge when disturbed. Who would embark lightly on such an excavation? And what sacrilege to stumble over the sacred tumulus, as if it was a common hillock?

Putting on his coat, Philip Galbraith, pictured the scene. It was always awkward to use another person's telephone. You were ostentatiously left alone. If the telephone was in a prominent place, voices must be lowered. Conversation often failed for a more sinister reason. Natural curiosity to hear the purport of a message that could not wait. You had to sift your replies, suiting them at once to the recipient in the audience. But who knew what might not slip out?

and when you ought to be exchanging affectionate reminiscences untroubled by other considerations, the act of telephoning showed itself still more formidable. The doctor's old servant opened the door to Philip. He was recognized, swept into the drawing room, scanned, questioned, congratulated. How you have aged, said the doctor, and for long after Philip remembered the chill with which the word struck him. The doctor's son was there. They talked excitedly and happily. They produced old photographs, recalled in.

incidents, rejoiced in a common dreariness of future prospects. Momentarily carried away Philip began to tamper with his resolve. The intoxication of the reunion undermined it. The light and the warmth and the presence of several people, all excited and pleased because of him, obscured the plain issue which he must sooner or later face. But it continued to raise its diminished head. It overpowered, he felt the sincerity of his protestations of an immediate and lasting renewal of their friendship. It made its cynical commentary when they expressed their amazement how on earth they had ever allowed it to lapse. It gave the lie to their future meetings in London, however freely entered into, however freely confirmed. And yet, although pleasantly conscious of his intention ultimately to ask the

question which would give him away, Philip genuinely enjoyed the radiant bubble, which that question was to prick. He was still running with the hair and hunting with the hounds, getting the best of both worlds when the dreaded moment came. I must depart, he said, but I wonder if you would let me use your telephone first. Why, of course we should be delighted, said the doctor's wife, but we haven't got a telephone. My husband is so tiresome he won't have one. Isn't he too old-fashioned? And she looked at him with pride.

Aided by numerous inquiries, Philip Galbraith made his way circuitously to the blue boer and telephoned. He would be home in half an hour. Leaving the inn, he glanced at his hat. It was someone else's. His own, he must have left at the doctors. First the telephone, then the hat. He threaded his way through the mazy streets, and for the second time in half an hour. For the second time in ten years, he stood at the doctor's door.

The maid will be tired of opening it to me, he thought. End of Section 4, the telephone call. Section 5 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. The Slibervox Recordings in the Public Domain read by Ben Tucker. St. George and the Dragon Athleticism reigned at Yarborough House Preparatory School. Athleticism tempered by underfeeding. Conscientious, not spontaneous, rigid and unimaginative rather than flexible and aspiring.

It had little organic or functional value. It was forever at odds with work and with meals, disorganizing the one and cutting the other short. It was, in fact, a moloch to whom the boys were joylessly sacrificed. Mrs. Fully loved Jackson, in removing her son at the end of his first term, said he returned to her looking like a half-starved lamb. Wolf, she might have said, and Wolf was the word that suggested itself to Miss Quilt, as followed at an equivocal distance by Mr. Blinkensop, the mathematical master.

She crossed the gravel playground. It was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, and Fridays, immediately after breakfast, the boys were drilled in military movements and formations. These mornings were cherished by the non-resident staff, consisting of Mr. Blinkensop and Miss Quilt, who came from a distance and valued the three-quarters of an hour's grace. But Miss Quilt dreaded crossing the playground, even with Mr. Blinkensop as escort. She felt that the dignity of her position as a class mistress, she also took the lowest form and top music also, would be compromised should she become involved in some unforeseen

change of the battalion's direction. Sergeant Hennesley's squad was only 50 strong, but he called it a battalion when he was pleased with it. He said it made the boys work better. Midway across the playground, Miss Quilt realized that the Philistines were upon her. Seeing the boys occupied at the farther end, she had allowed herself an ample margin. Now the platoon was bearing down upon her in line and at the double. How often had self-important little boys assured her,

in the intimacy of music lessons, that no person on earth, the driver of the Royal Mail possibly accepted might break through the files of His Majesty's forces when on the march, and that a column so threatened might beat the intruder to a jelly with their rifle butts. And when Miss Quilt, uneasy in spite of herself, urged that the Yarborough House contingent wasn't a part of the regular army, she was told that it was affiliated to the crack regiment of which Hennestly had been sometime sergeant. These accumulated misgivings, reinforcing her sense of isolation,

made Miss Quilt's plight in face of the advancing hordes seem desperate. The boys, espying their quarry, took in at a glance the absurdity and helplessness of her position. Regardless of their alignment, they lengthened their stride and quickened their pace. In every undeveloped face gleamed a primitive ferocity, a lust to humiliate the schoolmistress. Mr. Blinkensop shifted uneasily on his feet, a picture of indecision. He couldn't have taken the word of command out of the sergeant's mouth, even if he had known, what it was. Miss Quilt was stealing herself to bear the blows of the dummy rifles when the sergeant's voice rang out, about turn, the plague was stayed. Mr. Blinkensop slunk sheepishly through the school door.

How Miss Quilt despised him. She was trembling so much that she had to lean against the blistered doorpost to recover herself. Sergeant Hinnisly had halted his foiled Mermedons at the end of the parade ground and was lecturing them. Pretty stiffly had seemed, for although rigid at attention she fancied they wilted and writhed. How splendid to be able to cow half a hundred unruly boys, making every stinging word go home. Though she could be sarcastic, they laughed at her, whereas the sergeant's heavier, if less pointed reproof, seemed to threaten their manhood, troubling and even annihilating their self-esteem. She hated the immaturity of their stooping, ungainly figures, their callow crooked faces marked even in the youngest with furtiveness and sophistication.

They had an odious freemasonry, indefinable but expressed in a hundred small ways, nods, leers, gestures. New boys were miserable till they had been initiated into this strange religion, this disreputable technique of communal existence. How satisfying by contrast was the sergeant. If his face wanted refinement, looked, in fact coarse and worldly, it was redeemed by its vitality and vigor. His teeth flashed under his black mustache and his eyes,

sparkled. The set of his shoulders was reassuring, and though his clothes were of a common cut, he seemed better dressed than the masters who were gentlemen. Gentlemen, thought Miss Quilt, bitterly remembering Blenkinsop's pathetic failure to stem the avalanche, remembering too the irritating droop of his back as he fumbled with the handle of the garden gate. He had hastened up to open it for, solicitously and ostentatiously, and she had to help him out. The whole establishment is honeycombed with inadequacies, and and weakness, thought Miss Quilt. Except for Sergeant Hennessly,

he, at any rate, is a man. She composed herself for prayers. You're stupid, tiresome little boy, Robin. And you're not trying, that's what it is? Wrapped out the under-music mistress to her youngest people, a boy fresh from home who hadn't yet acquired the Savoy Fair, which served the others for triple brass against Miss Quilt's darts. The boy sniveled.

His woman-made sensitiveness suffered more from being hurt than from being terrorized. His stiff fingers slipped on the notes, for the room built on to the gymnasium and away from the main building, was very cold. He couldn't see the notes for tears and replayed the passage more incorrectly than before. You'll try my life out, pursued Miss Quilt, rising in exasperation and illustrating Fortissimo the right rendering. She hated the sight of tears. Go away, I can't be bothered with you anymore. The child slipped miserably off the stool. Must I stop learning? He asked in a choked voice,

but Miss Quilt, without answering, bundled him out of the door. She didn't follow him, however, for she knew that Sergeant Hennestly was in the gymnasium, waiting for his class. It was chiefly for the sake of having a few minutes to herself

that the music mistress had so unceremoniously parted with her pupil. Her assertion of his complete musical incapacity had effectively rid her of him. Thoughtfully, she sat down at the piano and executed her most brilliant cadenza. Then she opened the door and entered the gymnasium. If she had played her

trump card in the cadenza, the sergeant was also playing his. He had poised himself upside down on the parallel bars, with his arms outstretched and his body and legs rigid and vertical as if carved in stone. The technical name of the movement Miss Quilt did not know, but she realized its performance denoted great strength. She walked towards him so softly and timidly that she was standing by his side before his rolling, tortured eye, told him she was even in the room. All in a flash he relaxed, seemed to crumple, and finally reconstituted himself on the floor, a little breathless, rather red and covered with confusion. His hands troubled him, until he solved this difficulty by grasping the ends of the parallel bars

and leaning forward slightly as though he meant to move them. The attitude set off the magnificent molding of his arms, which his scanty running vest left bare. Miss Quilt looked past them and said, "'I'm so sorry I interrupted you, Sergeant Hennessley. There was a little thing I wanted to talk to you about.' The ex-soldier adjusted himself to the effort of conversation. "'It was about Robin,' said Miss Quilt, curiously nervous now that the sergeant seemed heavily at ease.

"'Robin Miss,' echoed Hennessly, as though no Christian name could have had any significance for him. "'Oh, yes, of course, I mean Robin's small-bones,' Miss Quilt hastily amended, "'Oh, small bows!' said the sergeant, with the emphasis of final comprehension. He led his eyes wander over Miss Quilt's neat figure. She was a small woman, trembling and tidily dressed in brown.

"'He's a silly little boy, I mean,' said Miss Quilt, correcting herself. "'He's a nervous child and not very strong. One has to be patient with him. I only say this in case you might feel irritated with him for not being able to do what the others do and keeping the class back.' ordinarily rather hard. Her eyes set near together in a face that was round, perhaps to a fault, melted noticeably

as she made her little appeal to the instructor in gymnastics. "'I know what ladies are,' pronounced the sergeant. "'Always trying to make school a home from home. "'But you can take it from me, Miss Quilt. "'Young Smallbones hasn't much to learn from the others. "'He's uncommon quick. "'I don't have to tell him twice.' "'Miss Quilt appeared greatly relieved.

"'I'm so glad. "'You didn't mind my mentioning it?' "'Always delighted to talk to ladies,' returned the sergeant gallantly. "'I'm sure there's no harm in having a kind heart.' Miss Quilt winced. "'Merely a kind heart!' As if to show how much importance he attached to the possession of such an organ. Sergeant Hennestly turned his head to see the time.

Miss Quilt wavered and glanced towards the door. Then, as though her mind was made up, she drew nearer to the instructor and laid her hand on the rounded wooden bar beside his. You must be very strong. I wish I were, said Miss Quilt simply. I don't want to boast, said Sergeant Hinnisly with a reasonable air. But if there's any man in the county, let alone the district, as would stand up to me for half an hour with the gloves on, well, I'd like to meet him. But strength isn't necessary, as I might say, for ladies.

Miss Quilt's voice was mysterious and sad. Ah, you don't know. Well, is it? Now the female anatomy, said the sergeant, lavish, on each word a wealth of explanatory emphasis is not by nature intended for the performance of feats of strength. Miss Quilt seemed to find the subject too delicate for discussion. I only meant that if I were half as strong as you are I shouldn't be pestered and insulted in the way I am. There, I oughtn't to have said that, added Miss Quilt apprehensively, and apparently on the verge of tears,

you led me on. You were so sympathetic. Do you mean to say? asked the sergeant. relinquishing at last his grip on the parallel bars and folding his arms. That you are, he paused for the phrase, but finally brought it out, The unwilling victim of some man's attentions. He seemed more surprised than indignant, pleased too that he had compassed a definition of Miss Quilt's misfortune, so unexceptionable and yet so clearly right.

His quickness in realizing her meaning put the music mistress out of her stride. Yes, she began hurriedly, as though impatient with herself, "'It's really all my own fault. "'I dare say I am too kind-hearted and too—' "'She looked up at Hennously to supply the word, "'but he was too much engrossed in following her elusive narrative. "'Anyhow, I have to walk to school that way. "'If I don't go through the wood, it means three miles extra.

"'And, of course, it's the same for him, too.' "'For who?' asked the sergeant, "'cutting through Miss Quilt's reticences. "'Mr. Blinkensop, oh, you mustn't say anything about it. "'I ought not to have told you, but he does make me so miserable. He will go with me. He says I need protection.

And now, when it begins to grow dark about half-past six, just as I have to go home, I'm really terrified of going with him. He... He... Does he kiss you? demanded the sergeant, with a peculiar ferocity of intonation,

as though his provision of it made Mr. Blinkensop's offense yet more heinous. Yes, he does, Miss Quilt admitted, and always in the same place, too. I mean, in the same place, part of the wood. He is so methodical, Miss Quilt paused for appreciation of this Sally in vain.

It's just halfway through. There's a clearing on one side. Oddly enough, the music mistress seemed to want to bring home to Sergeant Hennessly, to reconstruct before his eyes, the very scene of her dishonor. You couldn't mistake the place, she continued. There's a huge oak tree close to the path, the only one left in the clearing. It's marked with a big red arrow. I'm always afraid someone may be hiding behind it and see us. Anyone could. What would they think of me? Sergeant Hennestly was illuminated by an idea. Could I hide behind it? Miss Quilt gave it her consideration. Of course, you're very big, but I should think you could. There was a pause. Into the mind of the qualified instructor in gymnastics floated a picture of Mr. Blinkensop, also qualified, but to teach

mathematics, stripped ready for the fray. The huge muscle of his right arm swelled as he involved voluntarily caressed it with the embedded fingers of his left hand. Like mice nibbling at a Dutch cheese, thought Miss Quilt. I'd like to wring his neck, said Sergeant Hennessly, gloomily. Oh, no, Miss Quilt recoiled from the coarseness and violence of the expression, of which each word had been delivered like a knockout blow. I should hate him to be hurt, although he has behaved so abominably, yes, so abominably that I ought to have reported him to the head,

only then he would have lost his job. And after all, I suppose he can't help himself. Miss Quilt sounded a conciliatory note. To comprehend a set to pardoner. But if, as you suggested, you could conceal yourself behind the tree, say at about a quarter to seven this evening, and then jump out and frighten him and say, Be off, let the poor girl alone or something like that.

The unpleasant incidents would cease. You have so much authority with men, Miss Quilt wound up. I've often noticed it. Voices were heard in the changing room. Sergeant Hennestly turned his back on Miss Quilt as though their conversation had been too strictly a business interview to require or even allow the formalities of parting. He picked up a pair of Indian clubs.

I'll frighten him. The early autumn evening was very mild, and Miss Quilt, lingering unaccountably on the road outside the garden gate of Yarborough House, seemed likely to have a pleasant walk. But the under-music mistress appeared to be untouching. by the soft beauty of the twilight. She was excited and self-absorbed. Her restlessness changed to a gesture and a subdued cry of delight when she saw the gate at last open, and she ran forward and greeted

Mr. Blinkensop warmly. "'I've had such a dull day,' she sparkled, and I feel quite depressed. It won't matter, will it, if we walk together as far as the style. I know it would revive me. Please, Mr. Blinkensop, I don't very often ask you a favor.' "'No, Ada,' replied Mr. Blinkinsop, in a voice so soft and of such quality, that it mitigated even the somewhat uncompromising vowel sounds of Miss Quilt's Christian name. Don't you think we had better let the arrangement rest? After all, it was your arrangement. You felt, rightly or wrongly, six months ago, that our walks must be discontinued. You decreed the divorce, he pursued, with a sad playfulness. And this divorce

shall be as truly kept, as if in thronged court a thousand ears had heard it, and a thousand thousand lawyers' hands sealed to the separation. Miss Quilt, a little literal, perhaps, was nettled. Why, you talk as though we were married, when we've never even been engaged, but of course if you don't want to come, by this time they had reached the style. I can't compel you to. Mr. Blinkin-Sopp shifted, with his foot the early fallen leaves. I don't think you ought to tax me with our not being engaged.

The music mistress colored. Well, I don't weigh my words as you do are not. "'But be a sport now. I really am just a wee bit frightened. Traversing. Isn't that what you'd say, these Basque glades alone? Besides,' she said mounting the style and perching on the rail. "'I never meant our separation, as you call it, to be eternal in all that. I'm not sure I even said it. I can't remember. Oh, what it is to have a short memory, Arthur, but you remember everything, especially the unpleasant things.' Miss Quilt delivered herself of a sigh. Her manner changed as she continued. You take things too much to heart, Arthur. What harm can it do us just to walk through

the wood? You make me think you hate me and don't want to have anything more to do with me. In the deepening twilight, Mr. Blinkensop seemed to contemplate the possibilities of a lifetime spent apart from Ada Quilt. Yes, I'll come. You did say that grudgingly, said the music mistress a moment later, as she tripped lightly by his side. Yes, I'll come. Oh, what a concession, what a sacrifice, my dear Arthur, if I were taking you to execution, you couldn't go with a worse grace. I won't ask you to say you're sorry, but I think you might give me your arm. Oh, no, not to suggest a dangerous intimacy, but just to save me from falling into the rabbit holes. Mr. Blinkensop accepted the proffered proximity.

Miss Quilt's fears hadn't been groundless, or presently she stumbled and clung tightly to the frail support of Mr. Blankensop's arm. Nor did she relinquish it when the hunter's moon rose and revealed even the small pitfalls. Do you remember? said Miss Quilt in a voice honeyed, almost saccharine, with the emotion of reminiscence. How the last time we came this way, you quoted Shelley. I don't believe you do.

But you see, I treasure the things you said, while you only remember me when I was nasty. Anyhow, you looked back and said the path reminded you of something in Prometheus unbound. The path through which yon lovely twain have passed by Cedar, pine and you. And you said, it was just like you, that the word lovely only applied to one of the twain, and I asked which. And when you said, me, of course, I pretended to be angry, and said the comparison wasn't good because there weren't any cedars or pines or yews in this wood. Yes, I do remember, Mr. Blankensop replied, a new vibration in his quiet voice. He was coming on well. They had reached the edge of the clearing, and there, only a hundred yards away, still the

great oak tree distinct in the moonlight. Mr. Blinkensop stopped. Is anything the matter? Miss Quilt asked in a startled voice. Her alarm had escaped Mr. Blinkensop's notice. Nothing, he said in his soft caressing voice, and yet everything. Your quotation, Ada, reminded me of another. Through enameled meads they went. Quiet she, he, passion rent. Doesn't that, said he, beginning to move away. Describe our position exactly. And you can't find fault, he pursued, with a comparison this time, for there's the mead on the right,

with nothing but that large oak tree to show it was once forest. Guided by Mr. Blinkensop's walking stick, Miss Quilt made out the tree. It seemed to remind her of something. Oh, how tiresome, she's claimed despairingly. I've left a book behind. I must have it to correct those stupid exercises. Would you mind awfully I'll wait for you by that tree.

I shall be quite all right. Miss Quilt didn't often ask a favor. Certainly, said Mr. Blinkensop, and was preparing to go, had almost gone, when a thought struck him. What book is it? My elementary mathematics. Mr. Blankensop sighed his relief.

Why, I can lend you mine. Mechanically, as if stupefied by the good news, Miss Quilt took her protector's arm. Suddenly she disengaged herself. Arthur, how could you say, such cruel things that you loved me, but I didn't care for you. If he really loved me, you couldn't have said that. I don't want to walk any further with you. I must ask you to go back. Why did you force yourself on me? It was a new experience for Mr. Blinkensop to see the undemonstrative,

Miss Quilt, hysterical, inconsequent, the plaything of her emotions. A wave of passion caught him. Under the shadow of the oak tree, he clasped her in his arms. Darling, not here, not here, wailed Miss Quilt. It was some seconds before the music mistress was able to appreciate to the full, the success of her strategy, and the failure of her tactics. Reeling, but free, she saw her persecutor writhing in the grasp of Sergeant Hennessly. The vigorous instructor in gymnastics was making short work of Mr. Blinkensop. Retaining with his left hand his original grip on his victim's collar, with his right he wrenched the miserable man's arm behind his back and forced it upwards towards his neck. Miss Quilt,

who at first had watched the struggle with mixed feelings began to take pride in her champion's thoroughness. She couldn't have believed one man could so effectually humiliate another. Little squeaks of pain were momentarily forced from Mr. Blinkensop, abortive efforts to find the right quotation. Now Sergeant Hennestly was changing his grip. Mr. Blinkensop's head, wedged tightly under his adversary's left arm, jerked back oddly under the impact of several quick blows. It was like a spider dealing with a feebler sort of fly.

Miss Quilt was not perhaps a person of quick sympathies, but who could sympathize with such a ridiculous object as Mr. Blinkensop? How weak she had been! Her eleventh-hour compunctions, her frustrated subterfuge about the book, her last frantic effort to dismiss Mr. Blinkensop by means of a trumped-up coral might have dashed the cup from her lips. Instead, they had providentially precipitated the crisis. Not all the arts of love could have brought Mr. Blinkinsop so effectively to the scratch.

Assured of the issue of the conflict, Miss Quilt let her eyes wander. Lying at her feet was Mr. Blinkensop's hat. It had fallen off with Sergeant Hinesley's onset, and though a little battered had received much less punishment than its owner. When the victim of Mr. Blankensop's unwelcome attentions looked up, her champion had stayed his hand, was in fact adjusting his cap, which his exertions had sent a little awry, and the perpetrator of the outrage, breathing very visibly, had half turned his back on, the music mistress. Totteringly he picked up some of his belongings. A notebook, a fountain pin, the little treatise on mathematics he had so obligingly promised to lend Miss Quilt.

So dazed was he that he forgot to put the recovered articles in his pocket, holding them all in his hands, whence for his fingers trembled, they occasionally escaped and had to be picked up again. Miss Quilt stood her ground. It was not for her to lighten the penalties of her would-be seducer. Mr. Blinken-Sopp had secured his property by dint of clutching it to his chest, But he still lacked something, which he endeavored to find by describing circles, always with his back to the music mistress. This mysterious reluctance to show his normal aspect put Miss Quilt in mind of the reticent revolutions of the moon, but the reason of it was obvious when he did at last turn around. His jacket was torn, his collar gone, his waistcoat gaped open on his shirt, which was dark with blood running from his disfigured face.

He stood nursing the contents of his pockets and looking wistfully at his hat, which still lay like a trophy at the feet of Aida Quilt. That lady, from whatever motive, maintained her policy of non-interference. But the sergeant who had been pulling down his sleeves and stroking his tie came to the rescue. There's your hat, he said not unkindly. And seeing Mr. Blinkensop's embarrassed condition, he pushed the hat down rather firmly on his head, and taking the odds and ins from his victims' unresisting hands, stuff them all into one pocket.

The mathematical master slunk, stumbling away, leaving the sergeant and Miss Quilt, masters of the stricken field. Side by side they watched Mr. Blinkensop, with many a stagger, reached the bend and pass out of sight. That'll teach him, said the sergeant. He spoke without rancor. Miss Quilt was less laconic. Oh, Sergeant Hennestly, she said, I owe it all to you. She didn't specify the nature of the debt. What can I do to show you how grateful and how thankful I am?

There was that in her tone which conveyed to Sergeant Hennestly, who knew what ladies were, that in the matter of discharging her obligations, Miss Quilt was prepared to go very far indeed. A mist gathered before the ex-soldier's eyes. He took a step forward. The music mistress, not to do her injustice, also stepped forward. Her mother had told her that in dealing with men you mustn't let it all come from them. Justly conscious that it hadn't all come from Sergeant Hennisley, Miss Quilt waited.

She heard him mutter for inspection. The rest was lost in appeal of laughter. No, no, Miss Quilt, roared Sergeant Hennestly. Not this time. Rear-ranked two paces back. And he suited the action to the word. Never had Miss Quilt been so conscious of the resonant quality in the sergeant's voice. No, Miss Quilt, you're too clever for me.

It's not cleverness I'm after. And I don't want your studious friend to come back when he stopped spitting blood and give me one on the jaw. I don't like being hurt, Miss Quilt, and I don't like these triangle dramas. Though Sergeant Hinnisley was gone, his laughter seemed still to linger on the air. Ada Quilt, deprived of both her protectors, felt a little lonely. She had been the apex of that geometrical figure, which, as a symbol of human relationship, Sergeant Hennestly deplored.

In her, the lines of two men's fates had met, majestic confluence. But with the collapse of that colossal distention, she had lost her magnitude. Even the puny magnitude of dreary commonplace days, and had shriveled and dwindled to a point. True, she had a position, a horrible position. She was alone in the forest with a vacant will. Beginning to feel faint, Miss Quilt sat down on the grass. It was damp. With dew?

No, not with due. One glance at her hand sent the music mistress screaming down the lane. Ahead of her in the distance was the figure of a man. But for Miss Quilt, all particular terrors were sunk in a general panic. It was Sergeant Hennestly. He was carrying something heavy. As she overtook him, he called out, "'This isn't in your line, Miss Quilt.

It isn't a love affair. It's an ambulance.' Miss Quilt scarcely noticed the words, but the voice was tolerant and reassuring. "'These things will happen.' "'He's in good hands,' thought Miss Quilt as she ran on, and again with the iteration that plagues and soothes a weary brain. "'He's in good hands.'

End of Section 5. St. George and the Dragon. Section 6 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Librevoch recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Friends of the Bridegroom The Bridegroom came from a distance, but even making allowance for this, the Friends and Relations of the Bride felt that he was poorly represented. They filled the light-spacious nave of the parish church of Pleasanton.

The townspeople thronged the aisles, the poor chain. and the churchyard, wherever it afforded a view. But look as they would, only the faces of local folk met their eyes. Naturally, they were disappointed. The bridegroom was said to be well-connected. He would have interesting friends who would offer a new field for criticism. In the church, of course, little could be done towards investigating the matter, but afterwards in the big marquee, efforts were made to sift the unknown from the known.

They were only moderately successful. Here and there, one of the bridegroom's friends was distinguished, noted, and appraised. Only one called for special remark, a handsome, stylishly dressed man, who set down his first glass of champagne after drinking a mouthful. The other men constantly returned for more. The bridegroom, some whispered, was a non-entity. He did not attract the eyes of the guests. His movements were ordinary and taken for granted. The best man seemed of a peace with him.

Even his official position could not magnetize the bridegroom. There was a lackluster air about him. He was the kind of man to make any function lifeless. and yet the bride was a light of local society. It was affirmed that she shone in other spheres. Country houses were gladdened by her presence. People could not make it out. How? And she, as she stood almost alone in the center of the marquis,

looking idly and a little scornfully at the guests as they went to and fro along the side tables, seemed to be wondering too. Her eyes fell on that one of the bridegroom's friends who had excited the curiosity of Pleasanton society. He raised his hat. How charming, he said, to find the queen alone with all her courtiers dismissed. Certainly the guests were all occupied in steadying their glasses and manipulating their sandwiches. The bridegroom, it was to be presumed, had been detailed to show the presents, a superior shop-walker. The bride had been radiant in the church.

Where was her radiance now? She looked gloomily at the bridegroom's friend as though he had assumed a position, and then presumed on it. She had never set eyes on him before. but she did not know how to bring it home to him. My courtiers have taken French leave, she said. Lése majesté, he replied flippantly. Will you punish them with death, or will you pardon them? The bride seemed to entertain the first alternative.

Who would be my executioner? she said, glancing again at the group of guests' intent on their food. Inwardly, she thought, how shall I prevent my husband from asking this man to stay at our house? The eyes of the bridegroom's friend strayed round the tent. The executioner also is off duty, he said. Oh, no, he's not. I'm keeping him employed. On less responsible work, said her interlocutor meaningly.

Yes, on less responsible work, she looked at him hard. Would you undertake it? The role of executioner? He asked. From whom should I take my orders? She tried to evade him. I would give you carte blanche. Whose head would be the first to fall?

asked the bridegroom's friend, making an impartial survey. Well, you would have to make one exception. Of course, he replied. I would remove no one who had claims on your affection. The conversation languished. It was the bride's duty, she knew, to exchange a few words with all the more important guests. This duty had not been performed. Why did she linger bandying words with this man?

Her only excuse was that her husband, as whose compliment she must make this religious tour, still lingered. Suddenly she felt she must abandon the artificial tone of talk. Have you known my husband long? She asked, and avoided for the first time meeting the eyes of her guest. Since he was a child, said the bridegroom's friend. And how long is that? She continued without thinking, but he took her up. Surely he has not concealed his age?

Oh, she said, trying to cover her. up the slip. In some ways he is still a child. The masculine counterpart of Dora, suggested the bridegroom's friend in his bantering faintly vulgar tones. We never expected to see him married. She was troubled but found refuge in resentment. Very few of you have seen him married. I was deputed to act as witness, said he. How intolerable, she blushed deeply. She the pride of Pleasanton, the glass of fashion, as the local newspapers had often assured her, and the mold of form. Whoever they are, your friends, she said very stiffly, I hope you will assure them that the man in whom they take so much interest is properly bound in holy matrimony.

I will report what I have seen, said he, suddenly very grave. There was a look in his face akin to pity, and it brought her to the verge of tears. What else can I say, he added, except to tell them how exquisitely. charming and lovely the bride is. But she had already turned away, murmuring, I must go and find my husband. The bridegroom's friend looked after her as she went. End of Section 6. Friends of the Bridegroom.

Section 7 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Librevox Recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. A portrait. To say that breakfast at Drey Shot was in mid-career or in full swing, swing would be inaccurate. It was decidedly waning. It was nearly over, and that was what the person's concerned cared most about. The absence of concert or pre-arrangement in their appearance was more marked than usual. Their entries were fitful, and their behavior more characteristic, truer to themselves than it would be as the day wore on. Some had slept better

than they expected, others worse. But all, if questioned by their hostess about their night's rest, were prepared to swear it was the best they ever had, either because the stillness of the country was so refreshing, or because to lie awake listening to the songs of birds was infinitely more restful, really, than slumber. But the question had not been asked, for their hostess had not yet appeared, and to the man, her husband, the thought of putting it would hardly occur. Anyhow, Mr. Marchmont, on finding the artist who was staying in the house to paint his wife, already established by the fire, merely remarked on the weather, adding, I hope you haven't forgotten the gamboge this time,

while his guest's reply was lost amidst the noisy unfolding of a newspaper. The artist scanned the various members of the party as they appeared, and noted there are several methods of bridging the gap that the night had created in their intercourse. Some greeted the new day with enthusiasm, shaking hands all round, looking out of each window and turn, and circling about the table as if every chair was a throne. Such a joyous reunion with the world would not have been extravagant after a ten years' absence from it. Others, hardly glancing to the right or left, made straight for a dish,

and, having helped themselves, sat down abruptly, and neither remained silent or took up some conversation at the exact point where the necessity of going to bed had cut it short. In the faces of these the artist seemed to detect a vague disappointment, as if they had hoped to find everyone in everything different, and the fact that they had remained the same served to make them a little worse. Of a few, it was easy to tell whether they looked upon breakfast as a ceremony, a duty, a penance, or a meal. The prolonged non-appearance of Mrs. Marchmont gave rise to inquiries and tentative expressions of sympathy.

For half an hour or so her husband expected her every minute. At length, conjecture gave way to distress and offers of help. Several people gave up, cherished, and intimate conversations, and simply looked. worried. Mr. Marchmont, after a hesitation so conspicuous that it turned all eyes in his direction, glanced uneasily at the artist and finally brought out as though it were a confession. You know, I believe you're the cause of my wife's keeping us all on tinterhooks. One isn't painted every day. Why, it must be ten years since she sat to you for her portrait. Must look her best, don't you know? He laughed awkwardly, and indeed the explanation was a little halting.

but it was surprising how quickly the party at the breakfast table seemed to understand, and even to be pleased by it. Mrs. Marchmont must have been still absorbed in her preparations when the artist detached himself from the company and made for the scene of his labors, a room that for all its big north window seemed to admit the daylight with a certain reserve, to warn it off, as it were, from brocades and needlework that it had perhaps victimized in the past. But no artifice of Kiariskyro could reconcile the eye to a while. a large rectangular tract that, from its commanding position in the center of the wall, testified to some important act of denudation. The artist showed no compunction in disarranging furniture. He pulled a gate-legged table towards the window, secured its somewhat vagrant legs, and set a chair upon it.

Like so many others, his easel had lost a peg, for which a stout twig, picked up in the garden, reluctantly did duty. The foundling had snapped off short in one of the holes, obliging him to set the canvas lower than he wished. Though the mischance was of old standing, and might surely have been remedied, the artist frowned at it, looked at his watch, and began to dob blacks and whites on his palate. These preliminaries once completed, time evidently hung heavily on his hands, his one anxiety was to be at work. When, therefore, he heard footsteps approaching the door, his look brightened,

and with the premonitory rattle of the handle, his face broke into a smile. He was still smiling foolish. at the irresponsive door when the retreating footsteps announced that he had once more been foiled. An agitated voice said, "'Mary, run into my room, and on the dressing table you'll see,' the rest of the message was lost. There was a pause, then the sound of footsteps. This time the artist was not left to digest his own smile.

The woman who entered was dark and dressed in yellow. For the rest, even a cursory glance was enough to show that ample amends had been made for her tardy arrival. I'm horribly late, I'm afraid. she said. I can't think how I came to oversleep myself. The artist held out his hand. When the sun breaks through the clouds, said he, we don't presume to ask why he didn't come out earlier.

We are grateful for the least glimpse. It is only when he leaves us in gloom the whole day that we feel unfairly treated. Mrs. Marchmont smiled. And how did you sleep? She asked. Like a log, replied the artist. The simile is unworthy of you.

said the lady. Why use it in preference to the better and truer one? We sleep like tops. It is only when the day comes that we begin to flag, to wobble, and to throw ourselves about hither and thither in ludicrous and ungainly movement. No wonder such a pitiful spectacle induces providence to chastise us into uprightness.

Surely I didn't say that to you before? She asked hastily, noticing the painter's smile. Seven or eight years ago, wasn't it? "'Tin,' said the artist, without thinking. "'She took a step or two to consider this, "'then dropping the role of moralist. "'I'm glad,' she said, "'that there was just time after you arrived last night

"'to arrange about having the other picture taken down.' "'It was your suggestion,' said the artist, "'a hint of impatience stealing into his voice. "'Yes,' she replied, "'but you fell in with it. "'You agreed that the first portrait might influence you, "'that it was better a way.' "'I remember,

he remarked with a touch of malice that he hoped would hurry her up a bit without wounding her. I remember how, ten years ago did we say it was, I came into this very room, and there you were, like a peach blossom, perched on this table, and how you pitched into me for keeping you waiting. Browsy old thing, you said, I was just going to give you up in wire for the court painter instead. Ah, exclaimed Mrs. Marchmont, moving with an odd effect of resolution towards the table. Pink, yes, I remember, and I was quite impatient because you altered everything and declared you would have to paint my face black and my dress magenta if I insisted on sitting where I was. Having handed the lady up to her throne, the artist twisted and even safety pinned the curtains.

He enticed and cajoled his sitter into minute changes of pose, the courtesy of his intonation increasing in direct ratio with the triviality of the changes demanded, and finally fetched an ashtray, which as he started to fill his pipe, he called the most necessary thing in painting. In the silence that followed, Mrs. Marchmont was aware of a feeling of emptiness, of vacuity, a sensation that though the success of the whole undertaking depended upon her, she was helpless to influence it. If only she might compose her features before a mirror. With its help, she could have quickly conjured up the expression that pleased her best.

A glance would have been enough. But now she felt utterly unrelated in a drift, and even wondered if she had an expression at all. She summoned moods, haughty, pathetic, interested, and tranced. She flung before the camera of her mind a series of pictures, the Alps, the Italian sky, a meeting with a friend, a motor accident.

Though feeling it a sort of sacrilege, she tried to recall the moment when she first put on her engagement ring. Surely she had an expression then. But no, she was conscious that everything had passed out of her control, that she was like a book long admired for its splendid binding, now for the first time taken down and read. Its hitherto uncut pages revealing one by one the intrinsic worthlessness of the volume, and the fact that ten years ago she had delighted in the novel experience of being painted gave her a pain.

The memory of that former sitting was already distasteful to her. Soon it would be unbearable. The artist looked up at her suddenly with the curious glance, half questioning, half amused, with which he, She rallied his two pensive sitters. Mrs. Marchmont smiled. Do you mind my saying something? He asked, with the uncertainty of emphasis and intonation that showed he was too much absorbed

to weigh his words. Certainly, said the lady. I have been thinking all along how quiet you have grown. Ah, the flight of ears, said the artist lightly. And what I was meaning to say has some connection with that. Do you know I find you a much easier and more interesting subject, than you were ten years ago? Should we take the years for granted?

said Mrs. Marchmont, only half-pleased at the compliment. But tell me, easier and more interesting in what way? The artist, however, did not immediately reply. Screwing up his eyes, he bent upon his sitter, a look that, from being a scowl, became almost ferocious. He appeared to record his evidently unpleasant impression on the canvas with a sort of indignation. He must have discovered some odious line or wrinkle.

It evidently needed confirmation for his next movement was to arrange his fingers like a pair of compasses, shut one eye, and glare at his sitter through the aperture with a cyclopean intensity of penetration. Amazement and malevolence were radiated from the single eye. Decidedly, he must have discovered something awful. After this fiendish display, which, could Mrs. Marchmont have so interpreted it, was merely an effect of concentration, he remarked in a voice that sounded strangely gentle, there's so much more to put down. I suppose you mean the ravages of time, said Mrs. Marchmont,

bravely but not without a tremor. Oh, it hasn't got to that yet, the artist replied, gazing at her through half-closed lids, trying to remember how I looked before, thought Mrs. Marchmont, and she said aloud, Are pearls? My husband gave me these, and jewelry difficult to paint? Stupid as she felt the question to be.

It might have given him a loophole, but his density was monumental. "'Do you know, I think I shall leave them out?' he said. "'Surely,' thought Mrs. Marchmont, people are painted in pearls. She herself had admired some, so real you felt you might touch them, in a portrait in the academy. And wasn't her portrait destined for the academy? When certain misgivings had beset her about having it painted at all, the thought of envious and admiring groups, who would forget to criticize the subject

in their appreciation of its trappings, sustained and consoled her, I would rather you painted the things in if you don't mind, she said. The artist said he had not got so far yet. Indeed, the sitting had not been in progress more than half an hour. Mrs. Marchmont was possessed with an almost uncontrollable desire to see how far he had gone, to know the worst at once. Through the semi-transparent canvas she tried to make out the significance of stray lines, they looked grotesque, outrageously coarse and thick.

The thing would be a caricature. Would you think it very childish of me to get down and look? She asked. You'd say it's interesting to you. It's much more so to me. The artist deprecated such a step. He had done very little, really, just a bit of background and a rough impression of the features in black and white. Mrs. Marchmont considered, if the picture was odious, and she knew it was,

would she have the courage to say, please change such and such a thing? I know I'm not like that. But she was honest enough with herself. to realize that to do so would be more than undignified. It would reduce the whole thing to an absurdity. Then why be painted at all? For many wary minutes, the lady who, an hour before, had made an elaborate, Toilette, not that it was necessary, but to make assurance, doubly sure,

played and then struggled with this idea. She was abandoned, left to her fate. No one would come in and interrupt this mutilation, this massacre. Indeed, it was to be hoped they wouldn't, for in ghoulish curiosity they might peer behind the canvas and recoil horrified from what they saw there, or still worse, pronounced it a striking likeness. It had been her idea to have the portrait painted. Her husband had acquiesced, but suggested it was a little premature.

Why, you're still the image of the last one. Ridiculous man. It was only after several applications of his provocative smile that the artist caught his sitter's attention, but this time she did not respond. Instead her eyes met his with such gravity that he realized something was wrong. Mrs. Marchmont, he began quickly. I hope there's nothing. Tears were trembling in her eyes when she at last broke out.

You will think it very stupid of me. I'd rather you didn't go on with the portrait. You don't mean leave it as it is, asked the artist in astonishment. You won't condemn me unheard. Quite mechanically, he had given her his hand, and helped her down from the table. The little transit with its demands on her attention seemed to restore her. Oh, no, she said.

Please don't imagine any such thing. I'm sure it would be an excellent likeness. She shuddered ever so slightly. But I don't think even you could improve on the first one here. She looked up at the blank wall. There was an awkward pause. And she went on. Isn't it rather extravagant, perhaps, even just the least wee bit vain,

to have two portraits, nearly full-length two, painted. You might almost say one on top of the other. As the artist made no reply it was borne in upon her that there was some disparity of sacrifice between her carefully conducted descent from a chair in his journey of several hundred miles. Surely the semblance of a little sincerity was due to him. Doesn't Hamlet say somewhere?

She almost whispered, "'If your mind dislike anything, obey it. "'I had a dream.' "'It wasn't Hamlet,' replied the artist, "'momentarily embittered by your selfishness. "'And let me meet your fears with another quotation. "'He that should order his affairs by dreams "'or make the night a rule unto the day

"'might be ridiculously deluded.' "'How admirably Mrs. Marchmont knew how to look hurt. "'If only in her search for fit expressions, "'she could have hit on that one. deeply ashamed the artist went to his easel and began dismantling it. In the process, the canvas, with the face carelessly limbed, was presented to Mrs. Marchmont's gaze. She glanced at it, furtively at first and then more boldly. She could hardly believe her eyes.

Slide as it was, the sketch had contrived to catch all that was most charming in her many expressions. An impartial observer might have detected a look of cunning, that had no counterpart in the radiant but condemned portrait stealing into her face. but the artist, fumbling with his deputy of the peg and confused by his blunder, noticed nothing. Tell me, said Mrs. Marchmont. What was that you said just now about dreams? It sounded like Sir Thomas Brown. The artist started up, the unlucky twig snapping off as he did so. Really, Mrs. Marchmont, it was nothing.

Please forgive me, I was a little tired, I think. Slept badly. Strange bed, I expect. It is not going to be. So difficult, thought his hostess. It was perfectly true, she said. Dreams are all nonsense. We women are so foolish. You must make allowances for us.

How slow the artist was. He stared, open-mouthed. So if you will escort me back to this prodigious altitude, may we continue the sitting? With an effort recovering his composure, the artist advanced to perform the ceremony. Her hand held high like a dancer's was already in his. remembering the twig he begged her to excuse him while he looked for a fresh one in the garden certainly said his hostess and don't be long for its nearly lunchtime the door closed and mrs marchmont was alone she was smiling but the smile of the portrait was even more brilliant than her own

end of section seven a portrait section eight of night fears and other stories by l p hartley This Libervox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker A Sentimental Journey For years I had kept it up my sleeve For eight years A very private consolation But I remembered a time when I hadn't been so reticent about it

When in fact I was fond of displaying it Metaphorically I would roll back my sleeve and say Behold the amulet Thus and thus did I obtain it For of course I couldn't be blind to the the decorative quality of the amulet. It did me good service as an ornament in the days when I wasn't ashamed to call attention to the material of my clothes or the substance of my limbs. Now, perhaps a little threadbare, perhaps a little withered, I was sitting, all undistinguished

and diminished, in a dusty third-class compartment bound for the almost maritime priory of Christchurch. As the train ran through Bisingstoke, I remember how I had spent an hour among the tombs that cluster around the ruined abbey. In Winchester, so shy of revealing itself to railway passengers, I had wandered like a ghost. But even in those incidents of my anomalous illness, incidents so feebly connected with life as to have acquired a spurious air of high romance, I had my secret elation. For the amulets supplied what then I most needed, an earnest of continuance. It presupposed a future. While the train skirted the barren strand of Southampton water, I recollected vividly how I had pulled myself together to make the excursion.

That excursion which was no part of a holiday, no part of a plan, which was undertaken with little hope on my part that it would ever enrich recollection. For what recollection, longer than a month or two, could I hope to have? The Christchurch expedition had been an escape and oblivion, but it had brought me back to life. Would it revive me again after eight years? The interval had seen the crest of my wave, not perhaps a very majestic billow, but a noticeable rondeur with its own definite outline, its own peculiar little roar. And if the stately verger at Christchurch had been able to foretell that, why shouldn't he prophesy for a second rejuvenation? If the spent water could gather itself into a billow eight years ago, why shouldn't it now?

And the custodian of the priory, I reflected, need not say anything at all, nothing explicit. He had only, just unmistakably and quietly, to remember. As I alighted on the small bare platform, it came back to me. That short, significant conversation. I had allowed myself to be taken round the building as one of a party, and had tried to sink what I felt to be my superior knowledge of architecture and a conscientious attention to our guide's remarks. My face, lit by an unreal eagerness,

was always in the forefront of the crowd of half-interested trippers who gaped round. the effigies or peered into the chantries. My pallid enthusiasm did me little credit for the man's information far surpassed mine. But perhaps he was grateful for it, for he said, as we were standing by the case that sheltered the flamboyant signature of the late emperor of Germany, it was the draw of the place, he told me, and attracted people who wouldn't look at the beautiful memorial to Shelley. Surely you've been here before. I told him I had, and congratulated him on having such an excellent memory for faces.

You must see a great many, I said. Every year about forty thousand, he replied. And do you remember them all? I had asked, with a persistence that must have seemed to him naive, for he smiled as he said, oh, no, not all, only a few. I felt I must have it straight from him. But you will remember me. Yes, he said rather gravely, I shall remember you for years. I stopped at the churchyard gate, at the end of the avenue of lime trees,

whose branches, fantastically tortured and twisted and intertwined, were fledged with the pale green of early spring, stowed the church porch, a black abyss, so profound that it recalled the violent shadows of Italy. But instead of going in, I turned aside to enjoy an anticipation the moment of recognition. My steps found their way to a tombstone engraved in lettering recently renewed with the enigmatic epitaph. I was not born, but raised.

raised not to life, but to be buried twice by men of strife. I too had had my interment and procured a precarious resurrection, not at the hands of Cromwellian soldiery, but partly at least through the curator of the Priory Church. He who daily had the sight of so many imperial faces had found something memorable in mine, some mark of individuality, some note of distinction, I like to think, something that was indestructible,

that couldn't fail to persist, and it wasn't a failure in faith that brought me here. It was a desire for the vividness of confirmation that mere evocation of the scene, how often I had evoked it, could not give. The colonel of my pilgrimage was the impetus it should give to life, the impetus that must come from outside and be divinely incalculable in its effect. Months of deliberation had collected fuel for my unaccountably languid machinery. The spark must be generated from without. Already I seem to hear the Verger's voice.

You don't remember me, sir, but I remember you. It's not a face that's easily forgotten. And I should have a cheap meal in the priory resthouse, or whatever its name was, and gloat over myself in my restored sense of distinction. It was cool in the church, and apparently empty. But I heard voices and hastened towards the choir. The wicket gate was open, showing at the aisles in a knot of people.

straining their heads towards the vault, with expressions of varying imbecility. No wonder that the poor man, forced to gaze upon those stolid, upturned faces should be struck by an even, moderately intelligent appearance. As if to make amends for any former listlessness, I now drank in every word, pressing to the front of the party. I displayed by nods and working of the eyebrows every sign of interest and comprehension. When the tour was finished, I lingered till last to slip my half-crown into the Verger's hand. He had tactfully refrained while the crowd was about

From embarrassing me with a formal recognition We were moving towards the door He took the money in silence and was turning to go when I said desperately I've been here before and I seem to remember you Ah, you see He said there's forty thousand of you and only one of me I remembered the number also I suppose I said

You only recollect people whose faces are in some way disfigured In the doorway we discussed the ways and means of recognition. Now you speak of it, he said. I did think when you first came in that I had seen you before, but in a minute I knew it was someone else. How did you know? I asked. Ah, he said, turning sadly away. Don't ask me.

I stumbled out into the brilliant churchyard. End of Section 8, a sentimental journey. Section 9 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L. P. Hartley. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. A beautiful character. Almost the first words I exchanged with Speedwell chilled me. Our meeting was accidental. Otherwise, I should have been better prepared for the changes in him.

I should have resigned myself to the discovery that they were changes for the better, not, as one would have secretly reassured me, changes for the worse. Even at school in some three years my junior he had threatened my peace. He was promising, he was coming on, he would make us elder ones look to our laurels. He was precocious and he was competent, and he was more conversant with his future than most people are with their past. When, as an undergraduate I had ventured to go down to my old house, I found him in command. How lightly he wore his responsibility, how serenely and impartially he seemed to deal with those feverish, rebellious cabals and crises in which I used to flounder.

Lienance had not made him an object of compassion, nor ruthlessness, an object of dread. Admirable creature, I thought, while he casually pointed out to me neat notices embodying reforms and discipline and routine that I had been too unimaginative to conceive and too unpractical and timorous to execute. But how would he fare at Oxford?

True, he had settled his college, his line in study, his line in athletics, He spoke of his set he had collected, with astonishing foresight, decoration suitable to an undergraduate's room. Serious pictures, massive paperweights, good china vases. Wrapped in brown paper and hidden away in a drawer was a cut-glass decanter. I felt its edges with my thumb, sharp nearly as a knife. Speedwell was no fool.

Of course the things looked a little sophisticated, suggested somehow that Speedwell wasn't giving the future its fair chance, was being rather cruel to its boasted attribute of unsubed. certainty. But he wasn't ungenerous to me. He even drew me out to my unreasonable mortification. He elicited something of my way of life, not, I imagine, with the view to imitation, for in the face of his politeness and interest I failed to convey the charm I felt it possessed. I'd not seen him since. He had gone to Oxford with his decanter and his paperweights and was ready. Oh, how ready, I thought, as he piloted me to his club, to come down. That he should already be a clubman was only another

example of his mundane precocity, or perhaps his parents had put him down for it, together with his school and college before birth. But, I'm used, certain things will have remained closed to him. Those intimacies, those exquisite accords and conflicts, not between character and character, nor between temperament and temperament, but between soul and soul. These will have been withheld. The delicate opportunism, the patient receptivity, the higher adaptability, the restraints and denials, the spontaneity and sympathy, what use could Speedwell find for them. His voice broke in upon my consideration of this problem. "'Did you know, Druitt?' he asked, handing me the bill of fare.

"'No, he would be after your time.' He had saved me the trouble of answering. "'He was a queer, chap,' said Speedwell. "'Queer, I thought. Probably eccentric and nice. I was ever a disciple of John Stuart Mill, but I tried to fall in with my host's mood. "'querer than most?' I asked. "'An esthete, I suppose. "'How my scorn hissed on the word.'

"'He was interested in art,' said Speedwell. "'I was crestfallen and humble. "'Speedwell ordered the wine and went on. "'He had a large circle, almost a salon. "'What did he stand for?' I asked diffidently. "'But once more my host seemed to resent my way of putting things. "'He hadn't exactly a platform. "'At least he had...

several. Quite a chameleon, said I, tentatively flippant. Yes, and none of his hues exactly brilliant. At least it's easy to say so now. Speedwell pondered with the unself-consciousness of one whose musings have always been treated with respect. At first he was considered clever. His mo were reported. It was fashionable to hang upon his lips. He was elected into innumerable societies. They weren't much to my line, but I went to a few, and there was Druitt. His eyes bent upon each speaker's face as though, afraid to miss a word. He hardly ever spoke, but he had a reputation for taciturnity, as well as for wit. He had an immense capacity for listening. Well, that couldn't go on forever, I said. It didn't. But the reason was not that people ceased to believe in Druid, but that Druid

ceased to be interested in appearing clever. So he decided to be wealthy instead. He gave innumerable meals. They were not very good, but they were free. Druitt had no manner as a host. He couldn't put people at their ease, but he was solicitous and conscientious. He went around filling up glasses before they were half empty. His preoccupation with the distribution of food prevented his joining in conversations intelligently. There were often pauses which Druitt tried to bridge over by looking benevolent and worried. He always seemed to be just not equal to the occasion, struggling, you know. He relied immensely on the cooperating. of his guests. He used to remind me of a waiter from a second-rate establishment,

very eager and willing, but clumsy, not deft, not precise, the sort of man who would be bullied by guests and kicked by the head waiter. No waiters are bullied by guests as far as I know, I said with some spirit. They may of course bully each other. Well, Drew it wasn't bullied, said Speedwell. He was treated with respect, almost with reverence. He had written something, a few poems, I think, in his first term. I never read them, but they were tremendously praised, and Druitt was always going to produce others. But there was no need.

Druitt never alluded to his achievements. His modesty was famous, but no one stepped inside that room of his, without feeling he was going to meet a great man. And how long, I asked, did the Panam a Sarsensis phase last? Only as long as Druid could afford it, said Speedwell. He wasn't really rich,

so he rushed to the opposite extreme. He gave tea parties. The cakes and things always seemed like fragments left over, relics of a more splendid feast. He was never tired of conveying to you that he had come down in the world, from an immense height, you understand. The faded glow of those altitudes still illumined him, but he rejoiced in their wanness, their threatened extinction.

He had always worn his clothes badly, producing fantastic creases where nobody else could. Now he rejoiced in their shepherds, happiness, declaring it was only decent to wear patent leather shoes when they were so old that their vulgar texture had ceased to be patent. He was not above a pun, but perhaps someone told him that his professions of poverty were being taken seriously. Perhaps there were important defections. Druitt had an inner circle to which he was faithful, and several outer circles to which he was as faithful as circumstances would permit. The inner circle, of which I was not

privilege to be one, may have found love and Druitt's hut with water in a crust, tedious. Anyhow, he abandoned his vow of poverty and entered upon his penultimate phase. At this point, I felt that Speedwell should have said something about making a long story short. We had reached the end of our meal. Speedwell, I noticed, had not allowed the distribution of food to embarrass his monologue. I had helped myself to the mustard. As we settled into our chairs, I ventured to be a chatological about Druid, Like Salon, or someone I hinted that Speedwell should consider the end.

He disregarded me. Well, the moon was approaching its last quarter. I said politely and faintly. Oh, too faintly for Speedwell, vindictive. No, it was full. That was the glory, the special distinction of Druid. He didn't wane. He was eclipsed in his fullness.

Quite how it happened I never knew. Speedwell's pause was eloquent of nothing but itself. A raconteur's device. Do go on. I said. Speedwell went on. The term was only a fortnight old when I contracted diphtheria. Just a slight affair, you know. One's grudging relations call it tonsillitis. While I was convalescing at Bournemouth, I had leisure to think out drew its new position. It was less definite than its predecessors. His admirers, they are silent now,

used to say that his poses weren't self-conscious. In fact, not poses at all. They followed each other naturally. They were the expression of Druitt's instinctively, when he had sucked one dry, he fumbled for another, and I think this explanation is truer and fairer than the one that is current now, the one that calls him a charlatan, sedulous of effects and unscrupulous about causes. He had no sense of style or form, no sense of the way a disheveled personality can be grouped and disciplined into coherence. He couldn't be guilty of the vulgarity that consists in aping the manners and modes of other men, he may have felt them, but he hadn't the mental detachment needed to realize them. He specially despised simplifications and shortcuts, the artificial exclusions

and emphases that are supposed to make existence significant while they really make it false. Speedwell had warmed to his subject. I said I liked simple souls who believed in institutions, who had plenty of corns to tread on, who availed themselves of traditional prejudices and of the organized and canalized endeavor of mankind. Druitt didn't, said Speedwell decisively. In that first fortnight he maintained ad nauseum, that in character definiteness of outline was an impertinence, an indefensible Pizelier.

He liked to think that Whitman, who talked about publishing oneself of a character, had no character at all. The spirit of God might breathe upon the face of the waters, but it was a privilege of omnipotence. The Normans and Angevines were credited with possessing the formative impulse, and look what they had done with it. No, Druitt moralized, one should live from day to day and from minute to minute. Receptivity should be strained to the utmost.

Attention should never flag. Every human contact must be treated as an end in itself, drained of all its sweetness. Personality must be poured out like water from a bucket, without reserve or stint. In the end, this expense of spirit would live. lead, said Druid, to the creation of a beautiful harmony. Sphere music, enriching life without the meretricious expedient of contrast and division, and bellowing up to heaven in accordion pleats of beautific sound. Druitt didn't say that, Speedwell hastened to add.

But while he was evolving his not-at-all novel theory, his expression would become wrapped in his periods, very full-blooded. And he tried to practice what he preached. His rooms were full of people, not grouped, artificially, round a table, or even sitting conventionally in chairs, but disposed about the carpet and attitudes suggestive of infinite relaxation. Druid himself would move about ministering to wants. His gait was carefully nondescript. His gestures were not gestures, but utilitarian movements. He seemed deliberately not to go straight to a thing he wanted, but to stray towards it like a

cat. Never was there an assembly so bankrupt of intention, so flagrantly. abandoned to satisfying its chance desires. In this popularization of affection, Druitt's real intimacies suffered. They must have dwindled, or why don't his apologists arise to defend him? It was extraordinary how he contrived to give every chance arrival the impression that he was the only person who mattered. Druitt had always been a little suspicious of me, but now he treated me as though there were years of pulsating intimacy behind our scant acquaintance. Still, I wasn't admitted into his inmost circle. I used to think of his room as a consecrated common, or a hallowed public house, where Druitt, as high priest or showman, made hourly a sacrifice of his heart.

I figured the Illuminati lolling and red plush chairs in the front row and watching Druitt awkwardly busied over his oblation, and how highly inflammable that heart was, how essentially combustible, oily, you know, a little sticky like his theories. There was plenty of smoke and brilliant effects of emotional kyruskuro, but was there much heat, I used to wonder. Anyhow, Druitt put in a lot of work. The daily renewal of his diffused and shattered personality must have been exhausting, and he earned the little descriptive tag which, even before I went, had attached itself to him. He had a beautiful character. That this phrase should be used quite frequently without any underlay of irony was a tribute to his influence. So I left him. The small

shop, which had been pre-eminently a private concern dealing chiefly in aspects of Druitt, with which emotional balsams had been given away, was transformed into a huge emporium, perhaps rather a gigantic dove-coat of souls. Speedwell stopped, more for want of breath than for the sake of dramatic effect. I pondered upon his account of Druitt's penultimate phrase, how explicit it Speedwell was, bent on tearing the heart out of the mystery, a spiritual detective. Other problems asserted themselves. Where to have tea? To make it an appendage to lunches unsatisfactory. Speedwell must be parted with. So profound was the short silence that his voice seemed strange as he took up his tail. Taram was nearly over when I got back to Oxford. I didn't see

Drew it at once, which was not strange for he expected to be visited, not to visit. But it was curious that I did not hear of him. Presently rumors came in. Disquieting rumors. Incomprehensible to me, who had been so long out of touch with things. One morning about twelve, I set out to see him. It was an hour at which Druitt was accustomed to see people. I listened at his door in case I might detect among the babble of voices, the tones of someone I didn't want to meet. Druid had such an odd assortment of friends. But there was no sound, I knocked twice. No reply. I walked in. The room seemed empty. Another look revealed Druitt, huddled up on his sofa alone. He didn't rise, but merely turned his head. I found it very difficult to reintroduce myself.

I've come back. So I see, he said in a lifeless voice, as though it was too much trouble to find a warmer greeting. I noticed that the kindness which used to give his full furry face a spiritual quality and save it from heaviness was not there. "'How lucky to find you alone,' I pursued. "'In my weak state I hardly dared to look you up. "'You are always so surrounded with clever people.' "'Yes,' he said, "'I am quite alone.

"'So I see,' I said, maliciously echoing his words, "'and I took a cigarette quite an achievement "'in the face of his undisguised in hospitality. "'He asked me a few conventional questions, "'but I found I did not want to stay. I will withdraw before the rush comes, I said, rising slowly, but without making any effort to detain me, he remarked, There won't be a rush. Where are the camp followers, then? said I, standing up a little weak and giddy.

He was silent so long that I thought he couldn't have hurt me. At last he said, and a tone louder than was usual with him, I hate them all. His hand dropped to his side and his face became clouded and stupid. He seemed to have forgotten that I was there. "'Wasn't it odd?' said Speedwell a moment later in an altered voice. "'There he sat for all the world like a bladder that has been pricked, or rather like a once-nice, buoyant high-flying balloon, half-filled with muddy water, sagging and crumpled and inert.

The effort of recollection made Speedwell's face work with an expression of real distress. "'Did you take any steps?' I asked. "'Yes, indeed I did.' did, Speedwell replied. One might have been sure he would. I couldn't leave him like that. I told him it was physical and that all he needed was rest in solitude. Solitude, I emphasized it.

But all the while, Druitt kept saying, Please go, please, go. In an irritable, helpless, imploring whisper. At last, I took the hint and went. I never saw him again. We rose as by a signal and parted on the steps of Scipal. Speedwell's Club

End of Section 9, A Beautiful Character Section 10 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley This Libervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. A Summons It could not have been long after midnight when I found myself awake, and so thoroughly awake, too. I did not feel the misty withdrawal or the drowsy approaches of sleep.

I had apparently been reasoning for some seconds, with admirable lucidity on the practical question. How had I come to wake up? The night was still. The ridiculous acorn-shaped appendage to the blind cord no longer flapped in its eddying elliptical movement. And what of that odious blue bottlefly? Doubtless it had crept into some corner. A fold in the valence, perhaps.

I could not believe it was asleep. It might be scratching itself with one foot in the way flies have, a curious gesture that seems to imply. a kind of equivocal familiarity with oneself. An insulting salute. A greeting one couldn't possibly acknowledge. Bly's have a flare for putrefaction. What had brought this one to my bedside? What strange prescience had inspired its sharp, virulent rushes, and brought that note of deadly exultation into its buzz. It had been all I could do to keep the creature off my face. Now it was biting its time, but my ears were apprehensive for the renewal of its message of mortality,

its monotonous memento mori. That spray of Virginia Creeper, too, had apparently given up its desultory, stealthy, importunate attack upon the window. Perhaps it had annoyed the window cleaner, and he, realizing the trouble it gave, had cut it off and dropped it to lie withering on the grass. I seemed to see its shrivelled, upturned leaves, its pathetic, strained curve of a creature that curls up to die. Surely this was not particularly sensible. A thought came to me suddenly. It must have been someone knocking.

My small sister slept in the next room. I remembered her parting words, uttered in a voice that was half appeal, half command. Now, if I dream I'm being murdered, I shall knock on the wall, and I shall expect you to come. Of course, I reflected with uneasy amusement. My sister always had a lot to say at bedtime.

It was a recognized device. It gained time. It gave an effect of stately deliberation to her departure. It was, in fact, the exercise of a natural right. One could not be packed off to bed in the middle of a sentence. One would linger over embraces. One would adopt attitudes and poses to rich and noble for irreverent interruption. One would drift into conversations and display a sudden interest. As I thought, now, what had put this silly idea into my sister's head? It was absurd that a child should dream of being murdered. It would not occur to her that there were such dreams. But perhaps someone had suggested it, a servant whose mind was brimful of horrors. I myself had mentioned a dream of my own. Well, it was nothing. Still, it had something about a murder in it.

Otherwise, I suppose, I shouldn't have thought it worth telling. Dreams seem so stupid to other people, so flat, so precisely the commonplace thing that wouldn't invade a first-rate imagination. Surely it is a privilege to be let into the secret of another person's dreams, and yet one recalls the despair hurriedly transformed into a look of conventional interest that greets confessions of this kind. But an elder brother's dreams are not to be dismissed lightly. Perhaps I had embroidered mine a little. If I went in, what, after all, could I do? Fears are intangible things, but they distort the features. It must be curious to see people looking very much

frightened. Would their eyes bulge, their fingers twitch, their mouths be twisted into some unmeaning expression? As a general proposition, it would be quite amusing. But to see one's sister in that deplorable condition, she would probably be in bed, clutching the sheet, peering over the edge like one of Bluebeard's wives, or perhaps chewing it, the first symptom of feeble-mindedness. Very likely, though, she would be huddled up under the bedclothes, a formless lump that I should be tempted to smack. But there are people who shrink from covering their heads, lest someone should come and hold down the bed clothes and stifle them. It is not very pleasant to think of such a person bending over you. Perhaps the child wouldn't be in bed. She would have to get out to knock. At first I

might not see her at all. She might be crouching behind some piece of furniture, or even hidden in the wardrobe with her head among the hooks. I should have to strike a match. How often they go out. You throw them on the carpet, and the smoldering head burns a little hole. How funny. If she were lying at my feet, I might drop several matches on her and never noticed till she screamed. It was much feebler that time. Better, after all, not to go in. It would create a sort of precedent, and one could not set up as a professional smoother of pillows.

Besides, children grow out of this sort of thing much more quickly if left themselves. Of course, I should not tell my sister I had heard her knocking. she might mistake my reason for not going to the rescue and think I had somehow left her in the lurch That would be absurd for in spite of the cold I would get out this minute Slip on my dressing gown and say There, there, everything's all right, it's only a dream Perhaps when my sister grew up I would tell her that I stayed away intentionally

Feeling it was better for her to fight her battles alone We had all gone through it Everyone keeps a few such explanations up his sleeve Age mellows them And there is a kind of pleasure in telling a story against one self. For the present it was to remain my little secret. For my sister knew, or would know now, at any rate, that I was a heavy sleeper, and if she referred to the matter at breakfast, I would use a little pious dissimulation. Children are so easily put off. Probably she would be ashamed to mention it.

After all, it wasn't my fault. I couldn't direct people's dreams. At her age, too, I slept like a top, dreaming about murders, not very nice and a child. I would have to talk to her alone about it sometime. Minutes passed and the knocking was not renewed. I turned over. The bed was comfortable enough, but I felt I should sleep sounder if my sister changed her room. This, after all, could easily be arranged. End of Section 10. A Summons Section 11 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley This Libravox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker.

A visit to the dentist. It was nine o'clock on a dreary morning in February. The dentist's establishment was smoothing itself down, putting on the finishing touches. The trained nurse, who sat at a desk in the hall, assumed her firm but kind expression, and pulled out her ledger of appointments. The boy in buttons yawned into the raw air and tried to free his demeanor of a certain sleepiness, which, do what he would, clung to him throughout the day. He was arranging the antique periodicals into little piles, set at regular intervals on the hot-colored mohabil. mahogany table in the waiting room when the nurse called him. There's a new patient coming this morning.

Quite time, too, said the boy pertly. He asks specially for a long appointment, said the nurse. He evidently expects trouble. It'll be in extraction. Her voice lingered lovingly on this, but the boy, to whom the operation meant nothing, did not share her enthusiasm. I believe you like hearing them poor women scream,

he said with a virtuous air. "'It's not a woman, it's a man,' replied the nurse, and she was going to add something when the bell rang. "'What name, please, will you come this way, please?' said the boy in his routine voice, almost all in a breath. The dentist's new patient went quite quietly. Instead of keeping on his feet and examining with an air of conscientious, unreal curiosity the books on the waiting-room shelves, he sank into a chair and sat there passive and, as it seemed, agreeably expectant.

At the end of a quarter of an hour he grew a little fidgety, not with apprehension but with impatience. Presently the boy reappeared. Mr. Clipstone is ready, he said in a hushed voice, and with grave solicitude of manner, but the patient jumped to his feet and followed Blithely the small, serious, important figure of the boy. The dentist was bending over a bristling little drawer that stood half open in the cabinet by the window. Good morning, he said, without looking up, and still intent on some nice discrimination. The patient settled himself in the chair without invitation and without concern. Mr. Clipstone, pushing in the little drawer, turned and unceremoniously applying his foot to a pedal, jerked the chair upwards some six inches.

His patient seemed to find the movement pleasant, and even to wish that it might go on. The dentist then thrust aside his heavy, swinging ubiquitous tray, and commanded his patient to open his mouth. He did so. "'Wider,' said the dentist laconically. "'Why not an adverb?' thought the patient. but it would sound pedantic. A dentist's vocabulary must be very difficult. Mr. Clipstone took a long look,

drawing in his breath as he did so with a thin, reedy sound expressive of dismay. Your teeth are in a shocking condition, he said with cold indignation. I came here to have them put right, said the patient in a neutral voice. I dare say, replied the dentist without noticing the rebuke. It's not much use shutting the stable door when the horse is gone.

The patient closed his mouth, partly to complete the metaphor and partly because it was easier to talk, so... "'Open!' ordered the dentist once more, as though from force of habit. But his patient, disregarding the magnificent, naked imperative, said through his teeth, "'You mean you can't do anything for me.' "'I can temporarily alleviate the pain,' replied Mr. Clipstone, using what was evidently a professional formula. "'There is no pain,' said the patient. "'Not at the moment, perhaps,' returned the dentist. There has been, and there soon will be again. The man in the chair could not deny this. Instead, he changed his ground.

Couldn't you pull some of them out? he inquired rather wistfully, though of course I would sooner have them stopped. There are twelve large cavities, announced Mr. Clipstone. It would be a long business, extending over weeks. Even then I couldn't guarantee they would give you satisfaction. I suppose, said the patient reflecting on this, that, Having them extracted would not extend over so long. That is the course I recommend, said the dentist in a friendly tone. Once more the patient seemed to ponder. Will you stop one so that I may see what it is like? I'm afraid I shall have to hurt you, said Mr. Clipstone warningly.

Never mind, replied his victim. Half an hour sufficed for the excavation. The filling took another quarter. The patient had clung to the arms of the chair and perspired a little at times. otherwise his behavior had been exemplary. Mr. Clipstone complimented him on his fortitude. But I must tell you, he added, that the others will give me more trouble and you, I'm afraid, still more discomfort.

Will they take longer? Ask the patient. It is not impossible, replied the dentist cautiously. His patient actually seemed relieved. You know, he remarked confidentially, while Mr. Clipstone pounded some ingredients on a little glass cube. I find I need an occupation. Yes, said the dentist absently, still pounding.

I think it must be my nerves, went on the patient, discouraged but persistent. I found my life rather empty. I have not been able to fill my days. He stopped tentatively and apologetically. Evidently he wished to go on. You don't appear to be a nervous subject, Mr. Scarsdale, the patient interpolated, almost ingratious. I have had some experience of neurotics, Mr. Scarsdale, continued the dentist.

They are invariably more sensitive to pain than you would appear to be. Mr. Scarsdale had evidently considered this objection. I think I find physical pain, almost a relief. The dentist fixed a new needle in the drill. It looked very sharp. That is certainly an abnormal condition. Mr. Scarsdale eyed the needle. It was so fine and slender that it seemed in some odd way to focus his mental disorders and bring them to a head.

Then it dealt with them itself. They seemed to perish in his own pain. A feeling of happiness came over him and a desire to make further confessions. You were quite right, he said. My teeth have troubled me for years. But I couldn't rely on them at all. They were so un punctual. If they hurt me, they did not make appointments.

Do you understand? The dentist shook his head. The progress of decay would account for sudden spasms of pain, he said. In many of your teeth the nerves have probably atrophied. The last one was alive, said Mr. Scarsdale. Yes, replied the dentist, advancing the drill. It appeared to be very excited. The nerve in the new stopping had to be killed.

The process of discovering that it would have to be killed had soothed Mr. Scarsdale. That will do for today, said the dentist. You had better arrange for another city. on Thursday. The patient rose, but was evidently anxious to get something off his mind. All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise, he quoted with an awkward attempt at being dramatic. This was to be my last resource. You will pardon my saying so, said the dentist, but it should have been your first. I had plenty of resources then, his patient replied. It was not until later that I saw clearly how they were dropping away. My passion for acrostics was the

last to fail me. I shall never forget the morning when I opened the telegraph at the usual page and realized all at once that I should never do another acrostic. Except through illness, I hadn't missed one for thirty years. And I was rarely ill. I had other interests, too, pursued the patient with melancholy satisfaction, and rather hurriedly, for he noticed that the dentist seemed to regard his absorption and acrostics with some impatience. I was fond of quite a number of things. Retrospectively, he seemed to consider these attachments. But in the end, I grew tired of them.

I suppose it was my fault. No single subject or even group of subjects is capable of absorbing for an unlimited period the activities of the human mind, said the dentist, a trifle sententiously. You think so? Ask his patient gratefully. Most decidedly I do. something else is needed.

Mr. Scarsdale sighed, but refrained from asking Mr. Clipstone what that something was. It is eighteen months since I did my last acrostic, said Mr. Scarsdale. My solution was correct. You've no idea how many I got right. I think they must have been too easy for me laterally. And ever since, you have let your teeth decay, interrupted the dentist, grimly but kindly. Yes, said Mr. Scarsdale after a pause. That's what I've done.

That, I may say, is all I've done, till I had this idea. There was a silence, then. Tell me, said the patient, looking about for the hat he had left in the waiting room. When you ask a person to open his mouth and he opens it. Yes, said the dentist, nodding his comprehension and trying to hide his impatience. Do you ever feel a sudden revulsion? Not, I mean, at that particular person's mouth, but at the whole business. the whole profession, I should say, of dentistry.

Do you feel a horrible repetition about their mouths and the way they opened them never far enough? No two mouths are precisely alike, said Mr. Clipstone seriously. His patient was almost testy. That's not what I mean. Do you ever feel as though your interest was worn threadbare, and you couldn't, for the life of you, put your hand to the drill, however much it was going to hurt them? Mr. Clipstone ignored the implication in the last question.

I mustn't waste your time, Mr. Scarsdale, he said. Dentistry is, as you say, my business or profession, and in any case my means of livelihood. If I felt the symptoms you describe, I should go for a fortnight to the sea and play golf, possibly two rounds a day. I see, said Mr. Scarsdale. Next Thursday, then? He had seen stooping about for his hat, more because he could not find it than from any condition. conviction that it wasn't there. The boy appeared. Yes, Thursday, said the dentist. Next patient, please. End of Section 11. A Visit to the Dentist.

Section 12 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Libervox recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker. The new Prime Minister. Evidently the news had spread here too, for I heard them whispering men and women in the Palm Court of the Haymarket Hotel. They were whispering his name. Let them whisper. They were not going to dine with him this evening of evenings. The new prime minister's summons was not for them. They would have to be content with their surmises, their stories at second and third hand. They made free with his Christian name and mouthed his nickname, but they hadn't heard his voice calling them by their nicknames, as I had heard it, two days since on the telephone, calling me by mine. I remember every word of the absurd little

colloquy. Grampus, speaking. Puffing, you mean? Grampus, they are defeated, they have had to go. And that means, Adrian, it means that the dinner we arranged in the year one to meet this contingency will ever so magnificently take place. The insensitive telephone hadn't dimmed the ecstasy, or deadened the jubilation in his impetuous, eager voice.

His life, as I remembered it at school twenty years back, had been a pure flame. He lived by an invisible. son within him, whose lustre these people had no conception of. How it's clear Ray would have pierced their interchange of envious half-truths, the asides and covert understandings, the unblushing commerce and the meannesses of their own souls, conducted by the discreet twilight of the Haymarket Hotel. But since the conversation of two women near me seemed intended for the ears of a third person, I had no choice but listen. Fancy making Scaldwell, chancellor of the Exchequer!

It was the eleventh-hour panic, though, of course, he had to give him something. I hope Adelius Caldwell appreciates his generosity to her father. Generosity is the least Adelina expects from any man, but she didn't get it, poor thing, for all her efforts. Do tell me what he said. It wasn't so much what he said, of course. Adelina staked everything on the dance last night. Lady Luxmore's ineptitude over the invitations had been so glaring that anyone who didn't know her might have mistaken it for malice. She couldn't have foreseen the developments of the last few days, but, my dear, think.

There were the Kearns and the Quantrains, the dupes of our precious Prime Minister, hiding their diminished heads behind the serried ranks of Aspedistras. Lucy's one idea, you know, for cover and decoration. And then picture it, dearest, Adelina walking slowly down the middle of the room, actually leaning on her father's arm like a bride, all white except her arms, which she hadn't succeeded in making not red, and her face, which she had succeeded in making blue, I do believe she thought she was in church,

and with the air and the airs of a conqueror, she bore down on the man of the hour, and he... There was a general Russell, the indefinite, unmistakable movement that is made on a station platform when the train comes in. Adrian Gault saw me first. It was not until he had threaded his way to my chair, greeted me and swept me into our private room that I had leisure to reflect how much he owed to the alertness of his senses.

The room was decorated. did rather profusely, and there was some scheme of changing the flowers on the table with every course. I remember most clearly the lilies of the valley at the beginning, and the flare of Poinsettius toward the end. Perhaps it was a little overdone, and I doubt whether our moods followed the transitions quite according to schedule. Whether it was my fault or not, conversation lagged during the first course. It had the insipidity of the lilies without their fragrance. Forget-me-nots followed them, I think, for Adrian, who had a vein of sentiment said that it would have been affection to leave them out, but, in deference to our friendship,

which needed no reminder, the most obvious place in the procession must be reserved for them. And what's more obvious than second place? He said in his challenging, intolerant way, except perhaps soup, and he pushed it away from him. I suggested, rather unguardedly, that preeminence had its obviousness too, and cited Mount Everest in the Eiffel Tower. He disagreed emphatically, the quality of a steam engine or a soldier, he pronounced, is freshest and fullest in its chief exponents. Beside the Great Bear, the six-coupled Great Western Express engines haven't any appeal. The monster Pacific sucks the life and meaning out of them.

They've no feature left but an undistinguishing inferiority. You could hardly, with the other by, even call them locomotives. The term would have more sound than sense. Superman, I said, thinking to crush him with the fell imputation of megalomania, you have propounded the parable. Shall I tell you the interpretation? He made no reply but stared gloomily at the untasted soup. His sallow aquiline face with its strongly marked features wore a brooding look.

It hadn't become fleshy, but it had lost the mobility and responsiveness of his younger days. He had always been too much a man of one aim to have great play of expression. He didn't give entertainment and lodging to passing thoughts. But now his vitality seemed to have been strained and, to narrower channels, showing itself born, concentrated, and intense, disconcertingly independent of his interlocutor's mood. His next remark startled me. What were they saying about me just now?

Reassured by the popping of a champagne cork I dare to temporize, they weren't really talking about you. None of your hedging, grandpa's? How do you mean, not really? Tell me this instant what they said. Why won't my conversation do? I grumbled. Why must I eke it out with other peoples?

Besides, you flatter yourself. You were not the burden of their song. He looked relieved, but incredulous. Who was then? And why did you say, not really? Consider your position, I admonished him. You must learn to answer questions, not ask them. Be more sphinx-like.

I said, not really because they used your name to denote a person quite unlike you, a creation of their own spitefulness. A waiter refilled our glasses. with the handle of a fork Adrian tease the bubbles out of his wine, drank it at a gulp and said, Did they call me a blackguard? Nothing of the sort, I cried, recoiling at the word. How could they?

They tried to make out a case. Your blameless record put them on their metal. They invented and inferred, but even so it was a poor performance. I don't know them, but I'm sure they can't have done themselves justice. It was hard to tell from his sullen impassivity whether my diluted account was carrying conviction. Detaching an exotic bloom

I stuffed it into my buttonhole Once it hung sideways Compressed and yet limp Reluctantly Bacchanalian I feel I must be a wet blanket I went on Trying to infuse some fashion And flourish into the depressed symbol on my coat

I shall have to make a speech Adrian And convey to you in weighty parliamentary periods What an honor you have conferred on me By inviting me to be your guest Your only guest here tonight I never saw a man so impervious to Elyation so heroically invulnerable to high spirits. Now, if your path to office had been strewn,

according to tradition with the corpses of your victims, you would have at least raised a wolf-hull for me to join in. But there you sit, austerely contemplating the untransferable, incommunicable, reward of virtue. I feel, I proceeded fatally stimulated by my own loquacity, as Andalina must have felt when, "'When what?' asked Adrian very sharply.

"'I had to consider. I really wanted to have from his own lips a denial "'or an explanation of the incident of Lady Luxmore's dance. "'Well, Grandpa's, can't you continue your wheezy eloquence?' "'I was hurt by his tone. I had done my best to make the dinner go. "'I, a naturally reserved person, forced into unaccustomed speech, "'I felt annoyed to at having committed the vulgarity of referring to Miss Scaldwell, whom I didn't know by her Christian name. I wouldn't let Adrian off so lightly after all.

As she must have felt when her claim was disallowed, I said. Claim! She had no claim? He burst out angrily. Generosity is the least that she expects, I quoted. It is indeed. He rejoined bitterly. So that was what they were talking about. And I suppose you heard how Adelina bawled across the room.

This is the night of our triumph, Adrian. Of course she had helped. She managed her father. He had his reward, I said. But Adelina, I gather, wasn't satisfied with his advancement. She wanted the joint triumph to be celebrated jointly. Adrian was following his own thoughts. When I didn't reply, she repeated her slogan.

What could I do? They were all hating me, everyone. Rudolph Kern went almost the moment I was announced. His long, sour face pale with hatred. If he attacks me financially, he'll have his own money against him to reckon with. But Hugh Quantrain stood his ground, and just as Adelina lifted up her voice the second time, I heard him ask the bandmaster to play the poet and peasant overture. A delicate allusion to my early verses in my early years.

I lost my head. The room seemed to swim, and there was Adelina. God, I thought, how I loathe that woman! But it was stupid of me to be rude to her. The debris of dinner was disappearing. There remained only the dessert, the clusters of post-prondial cups and glasses, and the extravagantly contrasted scarlet and green of the poinsettias.

The lapse of the meal from order into incoherence was a relief to me, but Adrian hadn't mellowed. With irritable fingers he was dismembering the brilliant whorrel of the nearest Poinsetia, and piling the crumpled rays, bruised and dark with their own juice, in a little heap by his plate. I said the association did me too much honor, he went on, and that I couldn't ask her to exchange a bed of roses for a bed of thorns. It wasn't very felicitous, but I only wanted to emphasize the separation.

Of course she was furious, I didn't mind that. But it is horrible to feel that all the months of excitement, the expensive spirit, I'll be frank and say, all the jobs and intrigues, have ended in this. People hate me and call me a blackguard. In the elon of the campaign, you won't understand it, Grampus, with your apathetic temperament. Everything I did was fused and drenched, in the white light of one endeavor. Details hadn't any separate existence. Friendships and enmities had the seal of a magical impermanence. All minor consequences were tributaries of the great consequence, emptied themselves into it, and lost their identity.

How could I injure people when I didn't even think of them as people? A river can't promise to irrigate every field or serve every city. It would pay for its over-conscientiousness by becoming a quagmire. And that's what I've come to. He said with a sigh. The current's gone underground, lost itself somehow. Everything is discreet. There's no common principle left.

Once I could discriminate by instinct, now I have to treat every letter and every interview on its merits, every petition from every fanatical little society, as though it were an end in itself. The Prime Minister has given your suggestion every consideration, but regrets that he cannot allow his name to appear on your prospectus for a proposed rubber plantation on the warmer slopes of the Chiltern Hills. And each refusal entails a corresponding unpopularity, as if I hadn't enough. The few successful place hunters take their appointments for granted. The rest nursed their grievances and wait their opportunity. We were in the palm court again.

It was nearly midnight, and the place was empty, save for a porter, and the dim figure of a woman beyond the double doors. But I lowered my voice. You mustn't take things so much to heart, I entreated. It had seen much service, that formula during the past two hours. You must be more resilient, more ruthless, people don't really hate you, I exhorted him, with all the emphasis of conviction as the porter bowing opened the door for us. The woman who was still waiting turned at our approach. Adrian raised his hat.

Why, it's Miss Galdwell. He tried to disregard her evident hostility. May I introduce my friend Mr. Simpson? Miss Galdwell inclined her head. We meet again, she said, almost on the same platform. It was raining hard in the wet pavement had the air of a deserted railway station. May I fetch you a cab? asked Adrian. How civil of you?

said Miss Galwell. But perhaps your friend wouldn't mind. He looks more suitably clad. My clothes were older than Adrian's, but not more waterproof. There was a cab almost opposite, but such was the downpour I had to go out to attract the man's attention. During my absence, they didn't seem to have exchanged a word. Would it be asking a great deal of you? said Miss Godwell, addressing herself exclusively to me. To see me home. I know Mr. Galtz so well, she added noticing my hesitation.

Let me set her fears at rest. He is able to look after himself. He needs no protection. Good night, said Adrian. Good night, I said, holding the cab door for Miss Scaldwell, who presently appeared, sheltered by the porter's ample umbrella. One-four-three, Cadogan Place, she commanded, but ask him to drive round the park first.

I settled myself into my corner. Do come nearer, Mr. I have forgotten your name. "'Simpson! How English, but I meant your Christian name!' "'George. Mine is Adelina. If only for the sake of warmth, George, come a little closer. My spine aches with cold. Now you must tell me all about Adrian, for I'm very much interested in him, and all about yourself. Only tell me about him first, and keep the best to last. We have half an hour before us. Now George begin. Our hero first saw the light. Is it known precisely where?

Is it known precisely when? 30 minutes, I thought. 29 minutes. 28. The car ran softly down Piccadilly. End of Section 12, the new Prime Minister. Section 13 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Librevox recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker.

A Condition of Release There are things one can. not get used to. A hot bath may, and perhaps ought to be, a habit. It rarely demands resolution. Its frequency within limits is taken for granted, and among ordinary people scarcely commends respect. But a cold bath, however misrepresented by self-hypnotism or conscience, is usually a practice, seldom a habit, never an indulgence. Be the prospect of immersion never so attractive, the reality of it, the imminence even, sets one's inclinement. nations and revolt. It is a chronic insurrection, the conscript forces of the will, that

minion of manliness, respectabilities rid out, may scotch but cannot kill it. But these are paltry encounters, bloodless Italian wars, compared with the campaign which opens with one's determination to bathe, and I, as with towel draped about my neck, I started on the good twenty minutes walk to the river, was complacently aware of this inward conflict, and the unwanted firmness, finality almost, of my farewells and in my avoidance of their tiresome, sentimental frillings resolution must, I thought, have been apparent. The snap of the gate was purposeful. My choice of the steep, utter haunted path to the wood was unmistakable. I evidently meant business. On the reverse slope that dropped more gradually to the river, this self-imposed

tension gave way to a more legitimate excitement. Gleams of the river kindled anticipation. The brilliance of the sunlit grass, glimpsed, tantalizingly between twisted branches or framed and occasional openings, made my heartbeat faster. I began to run. But before reaching the little gate that led into the meadow, I stopped. My thoughts took a gloomier turn, the danger of bathing when overheated was only one of many perils. Weeds, cramp, heart failure, the odious oozy circumstances of drowning. My loneliness increased, but I reveled in it.

Everything led up to it and emphasized it. Better to be drowned, I thought, than to be saved from drowning. Fished out of a swimming bath by an obese instructor and brought round by the relentless suppliance of physical indignities in an atmosphere staled by the breath of obscenely curious urchins. Better be drowned than rescued to make a brighton holiday by some officious tripper who would wear the Royal Humane Society's medal and never wary of retelling his exploit. In this intolerant mood, feeling that the very existence of the human race was an insult to my self-sufficiency, I approached the little green knoll whose further bank, I knew, sloped steeply to the water,

but not so steeply as to forbid one to recline on it and bask in the sunshine. Essential solitude and privacy, protection militarily perfect awaited me in this declivity, a security almost tangible, an exquisite medium through which my thoughts could roam with something amounting to physical pleasure. reaching the summit I stopped, for my stronghold had been surprised. A man was lying there in the most perfect, because the most unconscious occupation. His formidable boots, his gray flannel shirt, his corduroy trousers were lying all about. Ordinarily the thought that so much should be encased in so little gives a pathos to divested clothing, but his had an amplitude, an air of being successfully, if rudely worn, that forbade pity,

The impression of size was repeated by their owner. His head, pivoted on a large arm, turned slowly. He said, Good morning, indistinctly, down two sides of a clay pipe, and resumed his reflections. Hed about his ponderous garments, daunted and almost intimidated by his immobility, I undressed. It was a prosaic business, robbed of all romance. Subject as I was to scrutiny, observed, sized up, I had as little joy of the process as though I were stripping for a medical board. The man was intensely difficult to talk to, and his monosyllabic replies had,

I was afterward to remember, a sinister intonation as though he were secretly bargaining with destiny for my downfall. Mechanically, I stuffed my socks into my shoes, after them my spectacles and wristwatch, and sighed to think that this simple action should once have had all the thrill and significance of a final initiation. instead of lingering on the bank until the forces of attraction and recoil had reached a delicate equilibrium without giving the water a chance to get ready for me, I plunged in. The shock of the dive, usually as effective as a night's sleep and supplying a brand-new set of thoughts and sensations,

left mine exactly as they were, small, thwarted, and commonplace. This was awful. I swam round a corner to be out of sight of the monster on the bank, Unesily conscious that his proximity gave me a pioneering impetus, a confidence in negotiating weeds that I lacked before. The sudden rising of fish, the startling croak of a wild duck and the sparse discolored reeds, had no terrors for me. With equanimity I clove my way through slow-moving groups of foamy, closely-mast bubbles, to which I was wont to give a wide berth, thinking them the expiring size of men long drowned.

The climax of my courage came when I investigated and bestrored a great log, This, in other days, I would have shunned. Its curious confirmation in three coils suggested a serpent, and who knew how much it trailed, like an iceberg below it in the water. I stood on a shelving bank of gravel and laughed to feel it suddenly wriggle under my feet, and I dived in deep water and brought up a huge pale, fleshy weed. At last, trembling and feeling incredibly weak and heavy, I climbed out onto the bank and reached for my towel.

My eyes were blurred, and it was some seconds before I noticed that the man on the bank was partially dressed. Still longer before I realized that the trousers he was wearing were not his, but my own. He had drawn my coat up to his side. There might be all sorts of explanations. There were perhaps as many lines to take. One could not tell from his attitude whether he was a madman, a convict, or simply a practical joker. If he was a thief, why hadn't he decamped with the clothes? If he had meant it for a joke, he wouldn't have left the job half done. There was nothing moreover in his appearance to suggest jocularity. Provisionally, I was forced to conclude that he was mad,

and I thought perhaps the question might be thrashed out more amicably over a couple of cigarettes. I moved across to get them out of my coat pocket. Who ask 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 in his eyes. Now look here, he said. It ain't no damn 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 used 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 immutable hostility of his tone, the carefully maintained purposelessness of his outrageous behavior, 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 to 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 conscious. 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 attention 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 prosthesis 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 unwanted 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 playgoer 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 shoulders still testified. He was just a high-spirited Britain, 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 chuckled him into the river and then argued with him from the bank. His voice fell like a sword on that 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 the 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 damn trousers of yours off my legs? He explicitly replied, adding, with a preposterous straining after cultured pronunciation, Orris, I shall require my shaving water early tomorrow. That then was his suppressed condition, and I had complied with it. End of Section 13, A Condition of Release

Section 14 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley The Slibervox Recordings in the Public Domain, read by Ben Tucker. A tonic Is Sir Sigismund Keen at home? I will just go and see, sir, replied the man, opening a door on the left-hand side of the hall. What name shall I say? Amber, Mr. Amber. Mr. Amber strayed into the waiting room and sat down in the middle of an almost interminable sofa.

On either hand it stretched away, a somber crimson expanse figured with rather large fleur-de-lees and flinked by two tight bolsters that matched the sofa and each other. The room had heavy oriental hangings, Indian red, and gilt French chairs, upholstered in pink. A mixture of incompatibles, thought Mr. Amber, is contrary to the traditional uses of pharmacy, but in practice it may sometimes be not inadvisable. His mind was sensitive to its environment. Framed in the tabletop and table-legs was an anthracite stove, black and uninviting, this July afternoon as the gate of hell would the fire put out.

Still the man did not come, Mr. Amber murmured against the formality of distinguished physicians. The appointment was a week old. It was Sir Sigisman's business to be at home. He had crossed the hall before Mr. Amber's eyes, and yet the servant must go and see. Like a jealous landlord, fearful lest people should establish a common pasture on his experience. The doctor kept up this figment of a kind of contingent existence. Mr. Amber was considering this problem when the footman appeared.

Sir Sigismund is sorry, sir, but no appointment appears to have been made in your name. Sir Sigismund is to see a Mr. Coral at five o'clock. Mr. Amber changed color. I made the appointment over the ten. telephone, didn't I? I don't know how it was made, said the footman, who had moved to the front door and was holding it tightly as though it might escape. Mr. Amber took a pace forward towards the street, then checked himself and said with a great

effort, I think, I am sure, that I must be Mr. Coral. The footman stared, but you gave the name of Amber just now, sir. Suddenly the situation seemed easier to Mr. Amber. But they're both so much alike. He was too much engrossed in his solution to see the slight change that came over the footman's manner. Oh, yes, sir, the coral is pink. That's true, replied Mr. Amber, restored to a quiet dignity. But if you think they are both connected with the sea, they are both a substitute for jewels,

and worn by people who would prefer to wear pearls. And the telephone is so confusing, concluded Mr. Amber. I'm sure you find that if you have occasion to use it yourself. Satisfied to all appearances by this explanation, the footman disappeared, and Mr. Amber was presently ushered into Sir Sigisman's consulting room. Take her— "'Take a chair, Mr.—er Amber, is it?' said the doctor. "'It's not often I have the pleasure of meeting gentlemen with alternative names, but my friend, the superintendent of police, tells me they're not uncommon in the neighborhood of Scotland Yard.' Though Sir Sigisman's manner was reassuring, Mr. Amber declined the proffered chair and seated himself as near the door as possible, on a towering sculptured edifice, the last in an ornamental series.

I hope you don't think I'm a criminal, Sir Sigismund, he began earnestly, or a lunatic, I should be sorry if I had given your servant that impression. He seemed such a nice man, it's the case with many people, isn't it, that the telephone confuses them, and makes them say what they don't mean. I'm not unusual in that respect, am I? Unusual, yes, put in the doctor. Not, of course, unique. Mr. Amber looked troubled. Well, anyhow, not unique, but it wasn't about my aphasia. No, not aphasia, absent-mindedness.

He sought the doctor's eye for approval of this emendation, and the latter nodded, that I wanted to ask your advice, sir Sigismund. It was about something else. Mr. Amber hesitated. Yes, yes, said, Sir Sigismund, keen. I'm afraid you'll think me frivolous, seeming and looking as well as I do, to consult you on such a trifling matter. With your experience, I expect you only like attending cases that are almost desperate, cases of life and death. Doctors are not undertakers, replied Sir Sigismund,

let me assure you, Mr. Amber, that if only from a pecuniary point of view, I like to be in well before the death. My patients often recover. I'm sure I hope you will. Oh, said Mr. Amber, said Mr. Amber, a little scared. It's not a question of recovery, not in that sense. So much as of establishing the health. I don't look ill, do I? I can't see very well, said the doctor. Won't you come a little nearer, Mr. Amber? This is such a comfortable chair, and it must tire you to talk from a distance. Mr. Amber, aware that his naturally confidential voice, had to be raised rather ludicrously to make itself heard across the room, complied. He sat down nervously on the edge of the chair. "'Now,' said Sir Sigismund,

"'Tell me about yourself.' "'About myself,' echoed Mr. Amber, looking hopelessly round the room. "'Yes, yourself,' said Sir Sigismund energetically. "'And your symptoms?' "'Oh,' said Mr. Amber on firm ground at last, "'I haven't any symptoms. "'I'm only a little run down.

"'All I want is a tonic.' "'A tonic?' "'The idea seemed as unfamiliar to Sir Sigismund "'as the notion of his own personality "'had appeared strange to Mr. Amber.' "'There,' said Mr. Amber in a melancholy tone, "'I was afraid you'd think me frivolous,' Sir Sigismund recovered himself. "'No, not frivolous, Mr. Amber.

Anything but that. Your request is a very reasonable and sensible one. Only, you see, there are so many different tonics, suitable for different conditions in the patient. There is a type of man, I might say, a figure of a man, for whom cod liver oil would be less beneficial than, say, perish as food.' By no hypophosphates, Mr. Amber corrected. Sir Sigismund bowed. I've tried that.

It didn't seem to do me any good. Neither did Easton's syrup, though there is said to be poison in it. There was a pause. I thought you would be able to recommend me something better, said Mr. Amber at last rather lamely. But you give me so little to go on, cried Sir Sigismund, exasperated by his patient's marches and counter-marches. Better for what? On your own showing, you are highly strung.

If you want me to prescribe for your nerves, I shouldn't recommend a tonic but a sedative. Bromide, perhaps. Bromide, repeated Mr. Amber awestruck. Isn't that a drug? The doctor suppressed an exclamation. Yes, it is. I haven't tried drugs, said Mr. Amber reflectively. If I had a drug by me when an attack came on.

Tell me about your attacks, said the doctor. You feel faint, per se. "'Oh, no, not faint,' Mr. Amber protested. "'I feel giddy and ill, you know, and the room goes round, and then if I can I lie down, "'or when I'm outside I sit on a doorstep, and if I have time I drink some brandy.' "'How do you mean?' said Sir Sigismund. "'If you have time.' "'Well,' said Mr. Amber reluctantly,

"'sometimes there isn't time.' "'You mean before you've—' No, I don't faint. Everything goes dim and dark, but it's all over in a minute. If I fainted, there might be something wrong with my heart, and that would be serious, and interfere with my work, perhaps. But surely your attacks interfere with your work as it is? The doctor asked. Only at odd times, said Mr. Amber. If my heart was affected, I should have to stay in bed like my Aunt Edith. She was my last relation left in the world, and she was bedridden for years. Sir Sigismund Keane figured this.

stethoscope that lay on the table by his hand. But seeing a look of apprehension on his patient's face, he let it drop and said tentatively, I could examine you quite easily without this, alarm made Mr. Amber voluble. I've no doubt you could, Sir Sigismund. To a specialist of your standing, the inventions of science must seem merely figureheads. Anxiety to convey his sense of Sir Sigisman's superiority to ordinary practitioners almost choked Mr. Amber's utterance, and he went on more slowly. That's why I came to you.

I knew you would be able to tell at a glance what... What kind of tonic would be best for me? Sir Sigisman did not raise his eyes from the blotting paper on which he was scribbling. Yes, I can tell something. Mr. Amber's face showed a momentary discouragement. But he said with forced cheerfulness, but it isn't anything serious, is it? Whereas if I had called in Dr. Wormwood,

my own doctor, he would have insisted on examining me, and then it would have been revealed, Mr. Amber's voice dropped at the word, that I had angina pectoris, and perhaps even paracarditis and hypertrophy as well. Sir Sigerman rose, I can assure you, Mr. Amber, that a medical examination doesn't necessarily reveal the presence of any of those disorders, and cases of the three being found together would be, to say the least, extremely rare. He continued very kindly. You worry too much about yourself. You are a hypochondriac? Interposed Mr. Amber eagerly. Well, no, I wouldn't say that, said the doctor. But it is evident from your unusual familiarity

with medical terms and your apt use of them, that you have been uneasy about your health. Indeed, you told me so yourself. I read about diseases for pleasure, said Mr. Amber simply. But of course it is hard when you have so much. many of the symptoms, not to feel that you must have, at any rate, one or two of the diseases. Sir Sigisman Keen squared his shoulders against the chimney-piece. That is exactly my point. If I gave you my word of honor that you weren't such an exceptional victim of misfortune, it would reassure you, wouldn't it? Mr. Amber admitted that it would,

but before I can do that, I'm afraid I must examine you. It was Sir Sigisman's last word. No, cried Mr. Amber rising rather shakily to his feet. Why should I submit to such an indignity? I won't be examined and take my clothes off in this icy room when I am so susceptible to chills. His technical vocabulary hadn't deserted him, but swaying slightly, he went on in a more conciliatory tone. You couldn't possibly want to examine me, Sir Sigismund.

I am an uninteresting specimen. They told me so when I was passed for a sedentary occupation into the army. They said I was a miserable specimen, too. they said I wasn't the sort of man you would want to look at twice. Memories of Mr. Amber's dead life seemed to rush to the surface. And for all you say, I know you would tell me that I'm very ill, perhaps dying lingeringly, though it would be worse to die suddenly. Mr. Amber's voice dropped and he steadied himself by the arm of the chair.

I only came to ask you for a tonic. Surely that's a simple thing. A good, strong tonic. I wouldn't have minded taking it, even if it's a little. had disagreed with me at first. But you doctors are all alike. You will pry into the body of a perfectly uninteresting person. You will have your money's worth.

You shan't be disappointed, Sir Sigismund. I'm not a rich man, but I can afford to pay your fee. Mr. Amber fumbled desperately in his pockets, bringing up a strange medley of possessions and dropping them on the floor. But the effort had been too much for him, and he had lost the support of the chair. Sir Sigismund caught him as he was falling and lifted him onto a sofa. Mr. Amber lay quite still. Sir Sigismund undid his collar, which was fastened with a patent stud, and, as he came around, conducted the examination which Mr. Amber, in his waking senses, had so passionately withstood.

Sir Sigismund keen was writing at his desk when the dark dust thinned away from before Mr. Amber's eyes. He asked if he might have another cushion, and Sir Sigismund arranged it under his head. "'That's better,' said the patient. "'I must have had one of my attacks.' As Sir Sigismund continued to write, Mr. Amber slid weakly off the sofa and tottered across the room to the doctor's side. Are you making out a prescription for me? He asked in a subdued voice. Sir Sigisman nodded.

Is it a tonic? He inquired timidly. It will have a certain tonic effect, Sir Sigisman answered guardedly. I'm sorry, I made such a scene just now. You must have thought me very badly brought up. Mr. Amber murmured. altogether crestfallen. Sir Sigisman described a semicircle with his head in order to lick an envelope. No, Mr. Amber, your reluctance to be examined was entirely understandable.

Then I am very ill? asked Mr. Amber. The tenseness of his earlier manner had disappeared and he seemed happier. I have written to Dr. Wormwood about you, replied the doctor. His address appears to be 194, St. Mary's Buildings, Sturr-Straight Street West. "'West fourteen,' said Mr. Amber. "'West 14, I'm afraid your heart is affected, and you will have to take considerable care. Great care. You must go to bed as soon as you get home. Oh, never mind, Mr. Amber, you can send me a check.' "'A check?' said Mr. Amber doubtfully. "'It will be one guinea, then, thank you.'

As the door closed on Mr. Amber, Sir Sigismund rang the bell. A nurse appeared. "'Nus, I should be glad if you would see Mr. Amber to his home.' "'Yes, Sir Sigisman. "'Shall I inform the relatives?' "'You had better ask him,' Sir Sigisman Keen replied. "'But I forgot he has no relatives.' "'End of Section 14. A tonic. "'Section 15 of Night Fares and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley.'

"'This Librevox recordings in the public domain,' read by Ben Tucker. "'Withling End.' "'For, withling 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 bona fide travelers,

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 the first of a moment. 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 in 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 Clayton knows his own business best. It was odd that he should have chosen this particular method of conveying to his friends that their affection had become otious. 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 have after he went away. In reality, both before and after, and 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 antilicea and soul of his subsistence.

For I was certainly discarded. Of the half-dozen or so who had spent those fatal weekends at Withling and 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 incidents 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 ask myself, while the train thundered remorselessly on, could Oswald do to force 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, and reconciliation that Oswald had sternly repelled. And they were not meant 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 pen 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 passed 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 proved 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 injustice 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 dent 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 blushed 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 loath to be. It made no difference. I should be committed, or he might put 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 forever 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 fiber, 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 in with a, to him, calculable outbreak and 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 unsavory conditions of my inquiry, I went a step farther. Lichanthropy 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 a whistling 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 other. If anyone practiced black magic, it would be I the following Monday, the day after tomorrow, 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 and 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 candor 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 peric. I was shy flowering, not all hearty 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 titbits, 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 on her 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 indifference? 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. An hour later there came a tap on my bedroom door. It was Oswald again. He peeped in furtively as though fearful of committing a trespass on my absolute occupation. You sure you don't mind. What? Dressing for dinner, I was afraid you might think it's silly and pretentious when we're just to ourselves.

Of course not, I said. I expected to. Look at all my finery. It would have broken my heart not to wear it. Still, as if on sufferance, he sidled appreciably farther into the worm, light, admirably appointed room. Oh, so he has put the mouth for you. Then that's all right, and it suits you, dining at eight. That had been the object of his first visit, to obtain my sanction for the hour of dinner. Eight o'clock is quite my favorite time, I assured him. Good, he said, and discreetly withdrew.

Ever since he had greeted me on the steps of that solid red-brick house, volubly explaining and regretting his failure to meet me at the station, he had been—he had gone on, I felt inclined to say. Like that. Apologetic, conciliatory, concerned. He had raised point after point, problem after problem, neglect of which he seemed to think would jeopardize my happiness. And though I tried to meet his misgivings halfway with contra assertions and confirmations, I couldn't convince him that I was satisfied, that I had made up my mind, as it were, to stay.

He seemed to think that at the smallest domestic rub or breakdown, failure of the bell to ring or of the bathwater to boil, I should stalk out of the house. The utmost he seemed to expect of me, his guest, was that I should consent to remain, that like a captious newly engaged servant I should waive my prerogative of impermanence and settle. At first I was flattered. It hardly seemed necessary to congratulate myself on my success. It had come so easily. I even planned in the interval before dinner to write my unluckier friends and tell them how deeply I had struck my roots. They no doubt had had to clean their own boots and wash at the pump in the stable yard, whereas I was met at every turn by gratifying traces of the slaughter of the fatted calf.

For them, Oswald had been at his most casual, indifferent, irresponsible, careless of their creature comforts. For me, how different! And compliment to me he had put off his ordinary manner, the genial fecklessness that sat on him so lightly, and assumed the air of an anxious housewife bristling, so far as his sobered, attenuated demeanor allowed him to bristle with Petit Saint. They were even embarrassing these eyes. attentions and their insistence, in their hydro-like quality of springing up double where one had been

scotched, and so I went on, multiplying the instances, deepening the contrast, until the sound of a bell, hastily smothered like a rising indiscretion, invited me to dinner. It was to be the keynote of my visit, I reflected as I lay in bed, invitation. The bell had invited me to dinner. Oswald's man had invited me to take wine. Oswald himself, in his first remarks, delivered ever so courteously across the oval table had the air of inviting reply. He began. Perhaps you've never been in this part of the world before. I was encouraged to say no. After a moment's reflection in which I supposed he was passing the countryside in review, he said, there's clum abbey nearby. Would you care to see it? I hesitated, not wholly from lukewarmness, but because I was at a loss how to frame my answer,

how to appear politely eager. He misinterpreted my silence. "'Don't feel obliged,' he said. "'Only I generally take people there.' "'Was this a threat?' "'I longed to say, take me anywhere else. "'To my lively apprehensions the innocent ruin "'took on the hues and horrors of a blue chamber. "'But I complied.

"'I succumbed to clum. "'Other invitations had followed. "'To smoke, to inspect the house, to play picket, "'to take the younger hand first, to name the stakes. "'Give me some indication,' I said, "'wishing that he hadn't after the insincerals. insinuating fashion of the odd job man, left it to me. Do you think a shilling?

A point? Just as you lie, he said. I saw myself a financial cripple, perhaps a bankrupt, but it seemed impossible without vulgarizing the lofty accent of our intercourse to suggest a humbler some. The game generally ends all square, doesn't it? I said flying in the face of experience. I have known it not, he admitted.

You think perhaps, Longingly I eyed the ignoble straw, not daring to clutch it, but he had seen it too. Well, I really meant a shilling a hundred. We were saved, but with what expense of spirit, with what reckless doles of hostages to misunderstanding? The appearance of whiskey, with all its mitigating accessories, turned on a cascade of major and minor invitations. Fortunately for this contingency, I was armed with ready desires. I directed, encouraged, and restrained with a will, and as a small return on my former prodigious outlay of reluctant adaptability,

I did find the water hotter, the whiskey smoother, the sugar sweeter, the whole brew more grateful and harmonious for the fact that it had been extracted, fought for out of the inmost pattern and texture of polite behavior. It was a stolen water, and if I had received it with some natural colloquialism, such as whiskey, not half, It would have tasted brackish and bitter. Instead, all the pleased, propitiated forces of convention and propriety came to its aid and poured their cautious sweetness into the cup.

When, like a climacteric, the last invitation came, the invitation to bed, final and inevitable as I felt it to be, I detected stirrings of revolt. I almost jibbed. A defiant impulse came to me, as it might come to one on the summons of the last trump, to turn over again to tender a qualified complaint. science, to suggest an alternative, almost to refuse. But here I was in bed, and I had gone quietly enough. Refusal.

That was the obverse of the golden coin that we had tossed each other, with rigid dexterity throughout the evening. But only at the last had I managed to catch a glimpse of it. Invitations, suave, deferential head was ever uppermost. I pondered over classical invitations. Webbers to the Vals. Shelly's less specifically to Jane. They didn't help because, from their buoyant, confident tone one could see they didn't contemplate a refusal.

But to all Oswald's invitations, an engraved, an almost embossed RSVP, was palpably subscribed. If he had just said, come away without troubling to call me best and brightest, or comparing the weather unfavorably with me, I would have gone with a light heart, ready for any enterprise, even excavations at Clum. or if he had piped to me in Weber's floored strain, I would have cried shame on my poor spirit and plunged into the dance. And that was what he would have done before my visit, or the mysterious cause that determined to my visit had cast its blighting spell. I should have been given no time to decide. My inclination and scruples would have been overridden or tossed aside and I myself whirled into happiness. Instead of losing myself in this delirious experience, I was condemned to sit eating unpalatable blackberries at a respectful distance from the state.

still smouldering embers of the burning bush, for its blaze and crackle illuminated memory, unquenched by the berry's bitter juice. And for music, I had the refrain of, will you, won't you, will you, won't you, join. Well, what? The figured frigid capering of conventional ghosts. I didn't want to, and I didn't want not to. Oswald flattered himself when he took such elaborate precautions against a possible refusal. It was a strain, too, negotiating his insipid proposals,

threading my way through the tiresome labyrinth that promised no minotaur. 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 stand. 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 unmarried, one of survival's most palatable 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, 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 rights as clum itself, I would still cling to it, though no one should take enough interest to offer me violence. 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 was, not garnished, even with forbidden fruits, it had an air of dereliction, I noted maliciously, not of preparation. The manger might be empty, but I was the only dolly. in the manger. It wasn't coldly furnished forth, with Vien's earmarked 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. Zellous as I was, he easily outstripped me in the competition for conferring favors. 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 a piquet and I had won the second party. I'm terribly afraid you're Rubicond, I said, adding up the score for the third time. Well, he replied glancing sign-long at my figures. I shall hope to do the same by you before the evenings out. Hope stirred in me. It was our custom to be more jubilant under defeat. All the same, his words had an ominous sound. 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 weekend campaigns, lightning successes without a check. I saw two the casualties privately ringing 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 underway. And I've a quartures of kings, the whole phalanx, I heard my host say.

It was the coup de gross. I was repeat. 95, he announced. Nothing. Ninety-six. Nothing. He played the cards almost vindictively, winning all the tricks and kapotting 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 146, 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 147, please.

And why poor you? I was still smarting under the pleas, 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 meager property, personal and real. The only considerable asset I had appeared to be my investment. My shares in the concern that was Oswald,

and that 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 straightened was common property, the only sort of property, in fact, in which they had 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 solacism 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 Tottie, perhaps I could have asked, but the interval had choked that weakly. 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 friendships' altar that I waved Oswald Clayton goodbye. As far as London allowed of it, I passed the week that followed my visit to Withling 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 scarecrowes of older standing, with which Oswald's waist ground had been so thickly planted. Dully I realized that outlets were stopped up, but even if I were robbed of motion, socially paralyzed, 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 the sinking of the heart that I heard a bounding step on the stairs followed by a resounding voice. It was Ponting, the artist. Ha! He said, drawing a fold of the window curtain onto the table, and sitting on it, What are you doing here with a face as long as three wet days?

He had a vigorous vocabulary, and his work was exuberantly morbid. I pass away the time, I said. You should have been where I've come from, he proclaimed. Then you wouldn't be looking like a candidate for confirmation. I disliked his tone and felt little, interest in the place that had made him what he was, but he forestalled my inquiry.

I've been at whittling end. Why, I exclaimed in spite of myself. I was there a week ago. And you didn't enjoy it? he demanded. If you mean in the sense that one enjoys poor health, I replied. I enjoyed it immensely. Frankly, I loathed every minute of it. He examined me curiously as though I had some disease.

Well, he declared, you are a comical character. I didn't amuse Oswald, I said. At that he laughed aloud, slipped off the table and danced up and down the room, chanting. He's one of Oswald's misfits. He's one of Oswald's misfits. Tell me the secret of your success, I said, fascinated by his ungainly antics. I suppose you fitted like a glove. My friend struck an attitude.

It was bone to his bone, he assured me. I tried to visualize this composite skeleton. When I arrived, he went on, the place felt unhomelike. Oswald wanted to wrap me up in cotton wool, but I soon put the lid on that. How? I asked. I waited till we were alone, said Ponting. His face were a puzzled expression, as though he were inwardly marveling at his own astuteness, and he spoke slowly and emphatically, studying the exits and apertures of my room,

anxious to bring home to me by pantomime, the very scent and savor of his discretion. Yes, I said. He looked at me hard to make sure I had taken it in. I waited till we were alone, he repeated, and when we were alone, I just touched him on the shoulder like that. Nothing more. He gave me a heavy pat.

The more from which he had refrained would certainly have been a knock-down blow. Well, I said, and then? He seemed surprised. Ponting said. So I drew him aside. But you told me you were alone, I objected. I drew him aside, Ponting went on and said, now that we're between ourselves, there's something I want to say to you. And Oswald said, say on, or something like that. I think it was say on, he said. And what did you say, I asked. I didn't want to be heavy about it. Ponting remarked carelessly. I said, a truce to all this palaver I shan't melt Oswald and I shan't break

There's no need to treat me like a vestal virgin That was all, but it did the trick What trick? I inquired Why? said Ponting, plunging into metaphor The gateless barrier was surmounted The walls of Jericho fell down It was his soul to my soul from that time forth we talked It was more than that, we conversed

For all the world like two lovebirds on an identical twig "'Spit it out,' I said, meaning his trouble, whatever it was. And he did, too. He told me everything. "'Ah, I breathed.' "'I can't remember his exact words,' Ponting continued. "'I can remember better what I said, "'but he told me he never meant a weekend party to be a frost. "'His true intent, he said, was all for our delight.

"'That was an eye-opener to me, I tell you. "'And it sounded like a quotation. "'That's how I came to recall it. "'He said he'd been afraid he'd offended me, "'and he mentioned you and some others, So he asked us to whittling in to make it up. He thought we had a down on him, while we thought he had a down on us, Ponting lucidly explained.

And then it struck me that I had been a bit snappy the last time he came to see me. I was feeling seedy off color and got my tail thoroughly down. He stayed a long time, and I got fed up and said the studio wasn't a home for lost animals. I didn't say anything like that, I'm used. No? said Ponting. Well, everyone has his own way of being rude. I didn't mean any harm, but he must have taken it to heart. He said it made him nervous and shy looking after people in his own house,

especially when he felt he had got on their nerves. He did everything he could. He went out of his way to give them a jolly time, but it was killing work, he said, like trying to warm up an icicle that just moaked and drooped and dripped. What he really meant was that they were like warmed up death, but he didn't blame them. He said it was all his fault.

Then we laughed over the whole affair. Lord, how we laughed. my side still ache. He rocked with merriment, and even I couldn't help laughing a little. Well, Ponting said at last, I mustn't stop any longer, mooning about, Oswald's waiting for me. Where? I asked. Why, were I deposited him, I suppose? said Ponting. To wit, at the foot of the stairs.

He won't thank me for telling you, though. He didn't want you to know. Would you like to see him? I hesitated. I thought I would wait until he called on me. Ponting burst into another guffaw, But that's just what he said about you! I began to feel rather foolish. All right, then, I said.

Invite him to come up. But, no, stop, I cried for Ponting was already on the landing. Tell him to come up. I'll whistle him, said Ponting. And I stopped my ears. Ponting was a genius. I should never have thought of that. End of Section 15.

Whithling End. Section 16 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L. P. Hartley This Libravox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Apples Uncle Tim, Uncle Tim! There was no escaping the voice. Uncle Tim hoisted himself out of his chair and limped towards the window. It still looked a long way off when the cry began again, close to, this time.

Coming! called Uncle Tim, but it made no different. The mournful, importunate anna pests followed each other without a break. Uncle Tim, Uncle Tim! It was like a wary luggage train climbing an incline. Uncle Tim threw open the window and leaned out. Yes, Rupert. Oh, Uncle Tim, said the child, and stopped as though hypnotized by his own incantation.

Well, Rupert, I want an apple, announced Rupert with an air of detachment, and as though, fetching his thoughts from afar. He proceeded with quick gavis. I want you to get me one. They're right up on the tree. Silly old tree. Why is the tree silly? Asked Uncle Tim.

He tried to speak indulgently, but a shadow of annoyance crossed his face. Because I can't get the apples, answered Rupert, his voice growing shrill. Do come, Uncle Tim, please. I did say, please. Uncle Tim was moving away when Rupert called him back. Uncle Tim, come through the window.

It's ever so much quicker. I must have the apples. I want them. wanted them ever since breakfast. I'm afraid I'm not an acrobat, said Uncle Tim. You're always thinking about your silly old leg, argued Rupert. Mummy says so. It won't hurt you. I'm not going to give it a chance, said Uncle Tim, and he definitely withdrew.

Rupert was standing by the apple tree when his uncle arrived, leaning against it with one hand as though to introduce it to its despoiler. Around him on the grass lay instruments of assault, stones, sticks, toy bricks, even a doll that belonged to his little sister. There was a horrible gaping hole in its brilliant cheek, and its dress wanted smoothing down. Overhead, the apples gleamed in the morning sunlight, each with a kind of halo and tolerably bright.

Uncle Tim steadied himself against the lichen-coated trunk and shook it. The rigid trunk gave a little and vibrated with a strong shudder, as though in pain. The apples tossed, noiselessly knocking each other in frantic mirth, but not one fell. Flushed with his effort, Uncle Tim turned, and saw Rupert, his face parallel with the sky, staring into the branches with a bemused expression. Why, they're not ripe, said Uncle Tim.

They won't be ripe for a month. Rupert's jaw dropped, and his face crinkled like a pond when a breeze crosses it. Don't cry, Rupert, said Uncle Tim. In a month's time, you'll have heaps. You won't know what to do with them. There'll be so many. I shan't want them then, said Rupert. I want them now.

He burst into tears. The passing of 30 years had made a difference to the apple tree. Even by the light of the candles, Uncle Tim noticed that. There were five candles, four on the bridge table and one on the impoverished sideboard that held rather precariously, the glasses and decanters. The tree seemed to have shrunk. Some of its lower boughs were dead. Its plumpness was gone. Its attitude set and strained.

Its bark less adhesive. Even its leaves were sparse and small. But Rupert had bloomed. Not into a passion flower exactly, thought Uncle Tim, pausing just beyond the reach of the candlelight. The September night was dark and very warm and still. The unwinking flame irradiated dully the great orb of Rupert's face. It glowed like tarnished copper and seemed of one color with his lips, as his features shared their generous contours. His head lulled on the back of a basket chair whose cushioned, rim creaked beneath its weight.

But his half-closed eyes, independent of those movements, never left his part. partner. She was playing the hand, but at times her jeweled fingers came abruptly across, twitching her fur with a gesture always provisional, always repeated. Suddenly she stomped. "'Four,' said Rupert. "'That's the rubber,' Uncle Tim came out of the shadow. "'Isn't it very damp?' he said, and rather late. It's nearly three.' Rupert was adding up the score, and nobody spoke. At last Rupert said, "'I make it twelve hundred. Anybody got anything different?' No one challenged the score.

How do you feel about another? Rupert asked, still ignoring Uncle Tim. The man on Rupert's left found his voice. It depends what you mean by another. Another whiskey, yes. Help yourself, said Rupert, and get me one too. It's crimmed-menth for you, Bertie. I don't mind, said the lady so addressed. During the pause that followed Rupert lit a cigar with great deliberation. Well, who's for going on? he said. Again, there was a silence broken finally by the other words.

woman. She spoke in a tone that sounded extraordinarily cool and sweet. I think your uncle would like us to go in. Oh, him, said Rupert, rising heavily from his chair. He has such Victorian ideas, haven't you, Uncle Tim? I don't want to influence you, said Uncle Tim. I only thought you mightn't have noticed how late it was. Yes, it is late. Do you said late, Rupert drawled, refilling his glass. That's what I like about it. "'Whiskey Uncle Tim? "'Drawner's sorrows?' "'He held the glass out with an unsteady hand.

"'Meanwhile all the players had risen. "'I want to go bye-bye,' said the other man. "'Put me in my little bed,' caroled Bertie, and they laughed. "'Everyone blew out a candle except Rupert, who could not extinguish his, "'and finally knocked it on to the ground where it continued to burn until smothered by his foot. "'The sudden darkness was confusing. "'Even Uncle Tim felt it, but Rupert lost his balance and fell heavily against, against the trunk of the apple tree. It seemed as though all the fruit had ripened simultaneously.

It thudded softly on the turf, pattered sharply on the card table, and crashed among the glasses. Uncle Tim struck a match to ascertain the damage. It was negligible. The fruit was lying all round in pre-Raphaelite profusion. Rupert recovered himself. "'Apples!' he cried. "'Look at those bloody apples!' He stooped to pick one up, but his stomach revolted from it, and clutching the tree he tossed wounded by his teeth away into the darkness. The match went out. What about these things?

Called Uncle Tim, who could not keep pace with the others. It was beginning to rain. Shall I leave them, Rupert? There was no answer. End of Section 16. Apples. Section 17 of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Ben Tucker. The Last Time Hector Standforth was not insensible to the great physician's high consideration. He had been escorted to the hall, helped on with his coat, even accompanied through the doorway into the high vacant porch, with its ocreas pilasters, and that privileged domestic, the imperious Carolyn, impressed by this demonstration,

had volunteered to go in search of a cab through the drizzle. Several things were implicit for Hector Stanforth in this rather splendid send-off, the most immediate being his recognition that it was final. It could never happen again. For crowned heads, such an attention would have had no serious significance, but Hector knew that it was a tribute to the fatal nature of his malady. It implied that his plight was desperate. So skillfully had the great doctor, in the earlier stages of the consultation, prepared the ground, radiating eminence in the regretful consciousness of infallibility that his patient felt that not to die, to date, would be an unthinkable breach of decorum.

It was as though he were being introduced by an influential friend to a prospective employer a month, say six weeks, before the engagement was due. So royally recommended, how could one feel otherwise than elated, a little stunned, perhaps also, but immeasurably committed to keeping up one's attitude. As the cab came grinding to the curb, overshooting the mark a little, excusably enough, considering the fog, Hector felt that devoted to destruction as he was, carrying his coffin credentials, in his hand, it was almost indecent for him to board the vehicle unaided. He readily accepted the driver's proffered arm and, sinking back upon the cushions of the car,

announced his destination in the most general terms. He would go anywhere the man liked. Three weeks later, confined to his bed, Hector Stanforth was ashamed of this anti-climax. In the interval he had performed prodigious journeys. He had resolved to visit as far as possible all the places in which he had been resident for any length of time, particularly outlandish stations, the scenes of his home service, not on account of their beauty, but because in the inflamed emotionalism of those days, they had bitten deeply into his consciousness. The milieu of incidents where his mediocre military talents had exposed him to ridicule, especially attracted him.

He would ask permission to send a postcard or a telegram from some camp post office, which had been for him. As for many other men, a loophole giving glimpses of the outside world. He tried to taste to the full, the finality of each separate farewell, to leave every experience rounded off and tidy, to re-explore, block up, and seal every imaginative avenue that teased his curiosity by the suggestiveness of its endless vista. Retrospectively, he did justice to invitations never accepted,

to proposed adventurers from which his timidity had shrunk. He invented retorts so stinging that reproachful commanding officers would have wilted under them. He had made no concessions, to his growing weakness, although every day made fresh inroads until he was unable to move outside the garden walls. But the intensity of his desire to extract the last drop of sweetness from his relationship with persons and objects that were dear to him increased with his waning ability to satisfy it. He was never tired of searching out familiar viewpoints, noting the progress of shrubs, speculating on the promise of walnuts for the coming autumn. He felt the smooth leaves of the irises

to see if they were thickening for buds. He noted, with exquisite displeasure, the tendency of the drooping ash to escape from its bondage and shoot skywards. Small irregularities, watery hollows and the gravel paths, projections, jagged and reddish-black in the fruit garden wall, renewed for him their old attraction. He wandered among semi-ruinous outhouses, almost gloating over purposeless bars of rusty iron,

worm-eaten spokes of wheelbarrows, and all crippled and disused fragments of a gardener. stock and trade. When he could no longer potter and pry about himself, someone would wheel him to his favorite spots, and though the transitional jerk hurt him, he liked to leave the gravel paths for the lawn, and took a childish delight in describing figures of eight with the wheels which dug deeply into the soft turf. Hector Stanforth had been humored in all his whims, sentimental and absurd as they were. It was plain that he found something in them to make his last days worthwhile. The pursuit of them, he said, with hyperbole excusable and an invalid,

clipped the wings of time, and made one minute seem a thousand years. The knowledge that in his final review not one of his silent acquaintances had been passed over kept him contented for the first few days of his confinement to bed. But one night his disease made an unexpected and terrible advance, leaving him in the morning almost unable to move and conscious of little, save his malady and his approaching end. By the hour, in his helplessness he shed tears of self-pity, and was too unmanned to mind when his nurse wiped them away in order to make him decent for the doctor. It was then that the notion, long-foreseen and dreaded by his parents, occurred to him. Helen Destre must be summoned to his bedside. In vain they

reasoned with him and cajoled him, presenting as delicately as might be the uselessness of reopening an affair that had always been mysterious, whose precise meaning for both parties had never been understood, which had narrowly missed being a little ridiculous, consisting as it did in moves and countermoves, advances and withdrawals. Smoke there had been for all to see. No one could find a flame. The stately building, erected over a number of years, stood empty. It might be called Hector's Folly, or Helens, but better let it remain empty than peopled with ghosts. What had been the upshot of their regularly infrequent meetings, but heart-searching and unrest, letters striving to hide or perhaps to display tentative emotions.

But Hector worked himself into exasperation, hurled recriminations, made vague but cruel charges, harped upon his approaching dissolution, and seemed to have lost all responsibility and be in danger of losing his reason. So, Helen Destre was wired for, and of course she came. Immediately after the dispatch of the telegram, Hector had asked that his room might be cleared of all traces of his illness. Medicine bottles had to be so. smuggled in and out. Silver candlesticks were imported, exotic, expensive flowers, reared or trailed themselves from every available platform. The room was made to look something between a church and a South American jungle, but Hector thought it beautiful. At half-past six,

his straining ears detected a shuffling outside his bedroom door, and a whispering about precedence and the order of going in. The knock, Hector felt, was a formality, almost a mockery. Had he not all day been plunged up to the hilt and readiness for this admission. Here is the patient, Miss Destre, said the nurse in a voice that was businesslike and encouraging, and with a tactfulness tinged with something more significant than mere sick-room etiquette, she left them, as they had often been left together. A bedroom chair would have prefigured too plainly the brevity of the interview. The almost sofa on which Helen sat down had been sidled awkwardly into the room to suggest permanence

and talk indefinitely prolonged. Helen had not wasted time. She was taking off her gloves and her big black hat cast every now and then a shadow over that face whose soft puzzled eagerness, childishness, and spirituality were too expressive to submit to the label of an expression, even when, as now, clouded with concern. She evidently meant to do her utmost for him, to be unprecedentedly nice. What color of excuse had he ever given her for being more? I do so hope you're a little better, she said.

I am a little better now, he replied with the slightest possible emphasis. But she blushed, and the awkwardness that followed was scarcely relieved by Hector's question. Did you have a comfortable journey? Upon this she was nervously voluble. She brought in every detail. She mentioned the names of people and servants at her home who were known to him and lingered on them reassuringly. "'Henderson, you know, took me to the station. "'Of course he was late and I nearly missed the train.

"'To the nurse in the next room their voices sounded animated. "'There were few pauses to tell of flagging interest, "'and yet, as she afterwards observed, "'it didn't seem to come from the heart.' "'Through the medley of anecdote and exaggeration "'to which their excited, intense, intonation "'imparted a spurious glow. "'Helen was conscious of the strain,

"'the effort required to keep it all up. But Hector, senting afar the intolerable failure of his life's denouement, strove feverishly to pull the situation out of the fire, and at the same time to realize the emotions, the reconciliation, the passionate reassurance, the sense of parting overpowered by the sense of fulfillment, which he had counted upon, which should have been his. But tries he might, nothing came to reward him but the cracked sounds,

the misplaced cleverness of words that forever missed their mark. "'Helen,' he said at last in a voice so changed that she started, "'I was thinking. "'He paused, and a shade of anguish he was too preoccupied to see past her face. "'She waited, then. "'That perhaps I ought to be going?' "'She said. "'A perverse fate revealed to him the hint of relief in her voice.

"'Good-bye, goodbye,' she said, holding both his hands. "'Then she called out quite loudly, "'Nurse, nurse, nurse, I mustn't tire your patient out, I oughtn't to have left him to entertain me, and was gone. Entertain. The nurse appeared directly. Her patient's face was buried in the pillow. End of Section 17.

The last time. End of Night Fears and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley.