W. F. Harvey (1910) — a man spends the afternoon drawing a stranger's face, then walks into the stranger's yard
This is not a story someone tells you. It is a document — a man's diary entry, written on the day it describes, in his own handwriting. He tells you at the start that he wants to get it down "while the events are still fresh in my mind." Keep that in view as you read, and notice when the tense changes.
Read each part, talk through the questions underneath, then go on. Nothing is hidden from you here; the story hides things in plain sight instead.
PHENISTONE ROAD, CLAPHAM.
August 20th, 190—.
I have had what I believe to be the most remarkable day in my life, and while the events are still fresh in my mind, I wish to put them down on paper as clearly as possible.
Let me say at the outset that my name is James Clarence Withencroft. I am forty years old, in perfect health, never having known a day's illness. By profession I am an artist, not a very successful one, but I earn enough money by my black-and-white work to satisfy my necessary wants.
I breakfasted this morning at nine, and after glancing through the morning paper I lighted my pipe and proceeded to let my mind wander in the hope that I might chance upon some subject for my pencil. The room, though door and windows were open, was oppressively hot.
I began to draw. So intent was I on my work that I left my lunch untouched, only stopping work when the clock of St. Jude's struck four.
The final result, for a hurried sketch, was, I felt sure, the best thing I had done. It showed a criminal in the dock immediately after the judge had pronounced sentence. The man was fat — enormously fat. The flesh hung in rolls about his chin; it creased his huge, stumpy neck. He was clean shaven and almost bald. He stood in the dock, his short, clumsy fingers clasping the rail, looking straight in front of him. The feeling that his expression conveyed was not so much one of horror as of utter, absolute collapse.
There seemed nothing in the man strong enough to sustain that mountain of flesh.
I rolled up the sketch, and without quite knowing why, placed it in my pocket. Then with the rare sense of happiness which the knowledge of a good thing well done gives, I left the house.
From there onwards I have only the vaguest recollection of where I went. The one thing of which I was fully conscious was the awful heat, that came up from the dusty asphalt pavement as an almost palpable wave. I longed for the thunder promised by the great banks of copper-coloured cloud that hung low over the western sky.
I must have walked five or six miles, when a small boy roused me from my reverie by asking the time. It was twenty minutes to seven.
When he left me I began to take stock of my bearings. I found myself standing before a gate that led into a yard bordered by a strip of thirsty earth, where there were flowers, purple stock and scarlet geranium. Above the entrance was a board with the inscription —
From the yard itself came a cheery whistle, the noise of hammer blows, and the cold sound of steel meeting stone.
A sudden impulse made me enter.
A man was sitting with his back towards me, busy at work on a slab of curiously veined marble. He turned round as he heard my steps and I stopped short.
It was the man I had been drawing, whose portrait lay in my pocket.
He sat there, huge and elephantine, the sweat pouring from his scalp, which he wiped with a red silk handkerchief. But though the face was the same, the expression was absolutely different.
He greeted me smiling, as if we were old friends, and shook my hand. I apologised for my intrusion.
"Everything is hot and glary outside," I said. "This seems an oasis in the wilderness."
"I don't know about the oasis," he replied, "but it certainly is hot, as hot as hell. Take a seat, sir!"
He pointed to the end of the gravestone on which he was at work, and I sat down.
"That's a beautiful piece of stone you've got hold of," I said.
He shook his head. "In a way it is," he answered; "the surface here is as fine as anything you could wish, but there's a big flaw at the back, though I don't expect you'd ever notice it. It would be all right in the summer like this; it wouldn't mind the blasted heat. But wait till the winter comes. There's nothing quite like frost to find out the weak points in stone."
He went on to talk of marbles, then of his garden and a new sort of carnation he had bought. At the end of every other minute he would drop his tools, wipe his shining head, and curse the heat.
I said little, for I felt uneasy. There was something unnatural, uncanny, in meeting this man. I tried at first to persuade myself that I had seen him before, that his face, unknown to me, had found a place in some out-of-the-way corner of my memory, but I knew that I was practising little more than a plausible piece of self-deception.
Mr. Atkinson finished his work, spat on the ground, and got up with a sigh of relief.
"There! what do you think of that?"
The inscription which I read for the first time was this —
For some time I sat in silence. Then a cold shudder ran down my spine. I asked him where he had seen the name.
"Oh, I didn't see it anywhere," replied Mr. Atkinson. "I wanted some name, and I put down the first that came into my head. Why do you want to know?"
"It's a strange coincidence, but it happens to be mine."
He gave a long, low whistle.
"And the dates?"
"I can only answer for one of them, and that's correct."
"It's a rum go!" he said.
But he knew less than I did. I told him of my morning's work. I took the sketch from my pocket and showed it to him. As he looked, the expression of his face altered until it became more and more like that of the man I had drawn.
"And it was only the day before yesterday," he said, "that I told Maria there were no such things as ghosts!"
Neither of us had seen a ghost, but I knew what he meant.
"You probably heard my name," I said.
"And you must have seen me somewhere and have forgotten it! Were you at Clacton-on-Sea last July?"
I had never been to Clacton in my life. We were silent for some time. We were both looking at the same thing, the two dates on the gravestone, and one was right.
"Come inside and have some supper," said Mr. Atkinson.
His wife was a cheerful little woman, with the flaky red cheeks of the country-bred. Her husband introduced me as a friend of his who was an artist.
I went outside, and found Atkinson sitting on the gravestone smoking. We resumed the conversation at the point we had left off.
"You must excuse my asking," I said, "but do you know of anything you've done for which you could be put on trial?"
He shook his head. "I'm not a bankrupt, the business is prosperous enough. Three years ago I gave turkeys to some of the guardians at Christmas, but that's all I can think of. And they were small ones, too," he added as an afterthought.
He got up, fetched a can from the porch, and began to water the flowers. "Twice a day regular in the hot weather," he said, "and then the heat sometimes gets the better of the delicate ones. Where do you live?"
I told him my address. It would take an hour's quick walk to get back home.
"It's like this," he said. "We'll look at the matter straight. If you go back home to-night, you take your chance of accidents. A cart may run over you, and there's always banana skins and orange peel, to say nothing of fallen ladders."
He spoke of the improbable with an intense seriousness that would have been laughable six hours before. But I did not laugh.
"The best thing we can do," he continued, "is for you to stay here till twelve o'clock. We'll go upstairs and smoke, it may be cooler inside."
To my surprise I agreed.
* * *
We are sitting now in a long, low room beneath the eaves. Atkinson has sent his wife to bed. He himself is busy sharpening some tools at a little oilstone, smoking one of my cigars the while.
The air seems charged with thunder. I am writing this at a shaky table before the open window.
The leg is cracked, and Atkinson, who seems a handy man with his tools, is going to mend it as soon as he has finished putting an edge on his chisel.
It is after eleven now. I shall be gone in less than an hour.
But the heat is stifling.
It is enough to send a man mad.
Six words. Three of them Harvey actually uses — you will have walked straight past them. The other three are the words you need in order to talk about what he is doing. Tap each card for the meaning and an example.
Answer in full sentences, using the word given. Do not reuse Harvey's examples.
This story runs entirely on expectation. A stone says a man is going to die today. Everything after that is two men handling an expectation they cannot prove or dismiss. English has a precise set of structures for exactly this, and they are the ones you need to discuss the story at all.
| Structure | What it carries | Example |
|---|---|---|
| be supposed to + infinitive | A rule, arrangement or general belief — often with a hint that reality differs | "He was supposed to walk home that evening." |
| be meant to + infinitive | Intention or purpose; also destiny in a slightly literary sense | "The gravestone was meant to be an exhibition piece." |
| be expected to + infinitive | What others predict or require — more formal, more external | "Guests are expected to leave before midnight." |
The one that matters most: put any of the three into the past with was/were + infinitive and English quietly tells the listener that it did not happen. "He was supposed to leave at twelve" almost always means he did not.
One word per gap. Read the whole sentence before you choose — more than one form is grammatical, but only one is accurate about the story.
1. Withencroft was to be at home that evening, but he stayed in Atkinson's house instead.
2. The marble slab was to be shown at a trade exhibition, not used for a real burial.
3. In court, a man who has just been sentenced is to show some reaction; this one shows collapse.
4. Atkinson was to be mending the table leg. He is sharpening a chisel.
5. Nothing about the day was to happen — and yet Withencroft can explain none of it.
1. supposed — an arrangement that reality overturned.
2. meant — purpose. Atkinson made it for an exhibition of headstones.
3. expected — what others predict or require; external, and slightly formal.
4. supposed — the gap between the stated plan and what he is actually doing is the whole ending.
5. meant — the "destiny" sense. "Supposed" would be wrong here: nobody arranged the day.
Answer each aloud in one or two full sentences, using the structure named. There is no single right answer — but a vague one will not survive the follow-up question.
This story is roughly 1,750 words and almost nothing happens in it. Two men talk about marble, gardens and the weather. The machinery is all underneath.
Harvey does not narrate. He hands you a piece of paper. Withencroft opens by giving his name, his age, his profession and his health — the way a man writes when he suspects the page will outlive him. That frame does one enormous thing: it explains why the story can stop mid-sentence. A narrator must finish. A document just runs out.
Look again at where Part 3 breaks. Everything before the three asterisks is past tense: I breakfasted, I began to draw, I told him my address. Everything after is present: We are sitting, Atkinson has sent his wife to bed, I am writing this. He has caught up with himself. From that line onwards you are reading in real time, and neither you nor he knows what the next sentence contains — because he has not lived it yet.
Count what Atkinson actually discusses: marble, frost, a trade exhibition, a new sort of carnation, watering the flowers twice a day, banana skins, orange peel, and the small turkeys he once gave to the guardians at Christmas. He is a pleasant, chatty, entirely ordinary man. Harvey knows that a menacing stranger is not frightening. A kind one is.
The turkeys line is the joke that does the most work: Withencroft has just asked him whether he has done anything he could be tried for, and Atkinson searches his conscience and produces poultry. Either he is innocent — or he has not done it yet.
Harvey ends on an inventory, not an event. A cracked table leg. A chisel being sharpened. A man who is "a handy man with his tools." Eleven o'clock. And a narrator who writes "I shall be gone in less than an hour" without hearing himself say it.
Not one of those details is a statement. Together they are a conclusion. The reader assembles the ending out of objects the narrator has calmly listed — which is why the story cannot be summarised without being destroyed.
1. In the final scene, what is Atkinson doing?
2. Whose suggestion is it that Withencroft stay in the house until midnight?
3. Why does Harvey have Atkinson explain the invisible flaw in the marble?
4. What does the shift from past tense to present tense in the final section achieve?
5. "I shall be gone in less than an hour." Why is this the most dangerous sentence in the story?
Do all four in order. The timer is there to make you fill the time rather than escape it. Use the vocabulary and the expectation structures from the earlier tabs.
Tell the story back to me as though I have never read it — in your own words, not line by line, in about eight to ten sentences. Use at least four words from the Vocabulary tab.
Then answer this: which detail did you leave out, and did the story survive without it?
Give me two endings that both fit every fact on the page. In the first, something supernatural is happening. In the second, nothing supernatural is happening at all and the danger is entirely made by the two men.
Use was supposed to, was meant to and expected to at least once each. Then say which version frightens you more, and why.
Argue that Charles Atkinson is entirely innocent — a kind man who fed a stranger, worried about him, and kept him off the roads on a bad night.
Use the evidence: the flowers, the wife, the turkeys, the fact that he was the one frightened enough to suggest staying. Then I will put the case against him, and you will answer it.
Tell me about a coincidence in your own life that felt like more than a coincidence at the time.
Describe it twice: once as it felt then, once as you explain it now. Where do the two accounts differ — in the facts, or only in the words you choose?