Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Yes, yes: coming, coming!’ and the footsteps stumped on.

  Well, I had no wish to meddle in any assignation. I had long since suspected that Mr Bloom’s activities may have proved responsible for guests even more undesirable than myself, even though, unlike myself, they may, perhaps, have been of a purely subjective order. Like attracts like, I assume, in any sphere. Still raw prejudices such as mine were not exactly a fair test of his peculiar methods of spiritistic investigation. More generous critics might merely surmise that he had only pressed on a little further than most. That is all: a pioneer.

  What – as I turned round – I was not prepared for was the spectacle of Mr Bloom’s bed. When I entered the room, I am certain there had been nothing unusual about that, except that it had not been slept in. True, the light had meanwhile increased a little, but not much. No, the bed had then been empty.

  Not so now. The lower part of it was all but entirely flat, the white cover-lid having been drawn almost as neat and close from side to side of it as the carapace of a billiard table. But on the pillow – the grey-flecked brown beard protruding over the turned-down sheet – now showed what appeared to be the head and face of Mr Bloom. With chin jerked up, I watched that face steadily, transfixedly. It was a flawless facsimile, waxen, motionless; but it was not a real face and head. It was an hallucination. How induced is quite another matter. No spirit of life, no livingness had ever stirred those soap-like, stagnant features. It was a travesty utterly devoid – whatever its intention – of the faintest hint of humour. It was merely a mask, a life-like mask (past even the dexterity of a Chinese artist to rival), and – though I hardly know why – it was inconceivably shocking.

  My objections to indiscriminate spiritualism the evening before may have been hasty and shallow. They seemed now to have been grotesquely inadequate. This house was not haunted, it was infested. Catspaw, poor young Mr Champneys may have been, but he had indeed helped with the chestnuts. A horrible weariness swept over me. Without another glance at the bed, I made my way as rapidly as possible to the door – and broke into a run.

  Still thickly muffled with her last journey’s dust – except for the fingerprints I afterwards noticed on her bonnet – and just as I had left her the previous evening, my car stood awaiting me in the innocent blue of dawn beneath the porch. So must Tobias have welcomed his angel. My heart literally stood still as I inserted the key – but all was well. The first faint purring of the engine was accompanied by the sound of a window being flung open. It was above and behind me, and beyond the porch. I turned my head, and detected a vague greyish figure standing a little within cover of the hollies and ilexes – a short man, about twenty or thirty yards away, not looking at me. But he too may have been pure illusion, pure hallucination. When I had blinked and looked again he was gone. There was no sunshine yet; the garden was as still as a mechanical panorama, but the hubbub, the gabbling was increasing overhead.

  In an instant I had shot out from under the porch, and dignity forgotten, was on my way helter-skelter round the semicircular drive. But to my utter confusion the gates at this end of it were heavily padlocked. I all but stripped the gears in my haste to retreat, but succeeded nonetheless; and then, without so much as turning my head towards the house, I drove clean across the lawn, the boughs of the blossom-burdened trees actually brushing the hood of the car as I did so. In five minutes I must have been nearly as many miles from Mr Bloom’s precincts.

  It was fortunate perhaps the day was so early; even the most phlegmatic of rural constables might look a little askance at a motorist desperately defying the speed limit in a purple dressing-gown and red morocco slippers. But I was innocent of robbery, for in exchange for these articles I had left behind me as valuable a jacket and a pair of brown leather shoes. I wonder what they will fetch at the sale? I wonder if Mr Bloom would have offered me Mr Champneys’s full £300 per annum if I had consented to stay? He was sorely in need, I am afraid, of human company, and a less easily prejudiced ally might have been of help to him in his extremity. But I ran away.

  And it is now too late to make amends. He has gone home – as we all shall – and taken his wages. And what troubles me, and now and then with acute misgiving, is the thought of Miss Algood. She was so simple and so easy a prey to enthusiasm. She dabbled her fingers in the obscure waters frequented by Mr Bloom as heedlessly and as absorbedly as some little dark intense creature on the banks of the Serpentine over a gallipot of ‘tiddlers’. I hate to think of any of ‘them’ taking her seriously – or even otherwise; and of the possibility also, when she is groping her way through their underworld, for she never really found it in this – the possibility of her meeting him there. For whatever Mr Bloom’s company in his charming house may have consisted of – and here edges in the obscure problem of what the creatures of our thoughts, let alone our dreams, are ‘made on’ – and quite apart too from Mr Bloom’s personal appearance, character, and ‘effects’, my chief quarrel with him was his scorn of my old harmless family friend. I would like, if only I could, to warn her against him – those dark, affectionate, saddened, hungry eyes.

  * First published in The Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, London 1926.

  Willows*

  The 2.17 p.m. this lovely, sleepy, precocious afternoon left only one passenger behind it on the wooden platform of the minute country station of Ashenham. Its volumes of vapour went ballooning up under the immense blue dome of the heavens; its nearly empty compartments rolled by; it was gone. And lo, Ronnie Forbes. With a short-sighted but observant glance at his rural whereabouts he stuffed his French novel into his pocket, gave up his ticket, passed through the booking-office and looked round for a cab. Here, however, the only signs of life were an empty farm-wagon, a gaudy red and yellow reaping machine, and a bevy of sparrows engaged in a dust bath.

  He turned back, and with that bland air of assurance which sets its possessor at ease in any company, he enquired of the porter if he knew of a house called Willows. The porter was so old and so old-fashioned that he touched his hat when he replied. He knew Willows well. Mrs Cotton’s house. And he gave Ronnie copious and reiterated directions how to get there. It lay about two-and-a-half miles distant. You turned to the left at the signpost after passing the Green Man, took the third turning on the right – a little before you reached the old windmill – and went straight on until you came to a little old stone bridge over a stream. And there you were. Why, yes, there was a fly, and it could be fetched from the village – and that was a mile or so in the other direction. But it was an easy walk if you liked walking; ‘And you can’t miss it, sir,’ he repeated again and again. It was as though here was an ardent pilgrim, and there, Mecca. Ronnie didn’t quite see himself descending on his prey in lonely grandeur in the village cab, and he had plenty of time. He waived the suggestion, and at once set out.

  No rain seemed to have refreshed the white dusty road for months past; indeed, on a chalky soil even a plenteous fall of dew vanishes into thin air when once the morning sun is up. But the meadows beyond the leafy hedgerow on the one side were as gay as a picture, and the dark acres of ploughland on the other were already sheened over with the first blades of sprouting corn. Sophisticated and urban creature though he looked amid this rural scene, Ronnie went on his way rejoicing.

  Nor did his footsteps flag until he had passed the rather tumbledown Green Man and the incredibly old traditional broadside gaffer in gaiters who sat with his beard and his blue-and-white mug on a bench under its motionless sign. Still, it was warm work, and as soon as a gateway showed, Ronnie came to a standstill and took off his hat. He leant both arms on the gate and looked over and in. The pasture in front of him rose in a smooth wide curve of the embosoming earth against the pure blue of the sky, and there in the tender sunshine stood browsing sedate old mother ewes, while others, no less stolidly maternal of aspect, sat motionless in the lush young grass. How human, and how stupid, they looked, thought Ronnie: and how engaging!

  And rou
nd about these sober dames was a host of long-legged lambs, their small inquisitive faces all turned in his direction, with sudden tremors of dangling flat woolly tails, and zigzag leapings and skippings aside in full butt of their mothers’ dugs. What adorable country! And the woods over there, a faint purple with their bare twigs, though a few were now full in their virgin young leaf! Larks, too – it was impossible to say how many. It was as though each one of them had its own spiral pitch in the blue, and had only to range that airy and invisible tower to keep its walls for ever echoing with song.

  Ronnie took a deep breath: it was little short of absurd – the combination of such a day and such an errand! Nonetheless he had made pretty certain of fine weather before setting out. For he hadn’t the faintest notion what kind of house and what kind of people were awaiting him. They might be perfectly awful, quite too impossible. Imagine that and a shivering leaden day together! On the other hand, the house might prove to be empty. Imagine that, and rain pelting down upon its abandoned porch! However, the porter had settled the question: ‘Mrs Cotton’s house’ – his very words. She was still there, then. But had the inquiring emphasis he had put on the name suggested something the least bit formidable? Ronnie shuddered. He did so dislike raw, unpleasant, intractable people.

  What a silly expedition! It all came of this touching greed on the other side of the Atlantic for the academic; this thesis craze. But data at second hand, was that really quite proper? Ronnie was still dubious. Surely any young zealot bent on a thesis should conduct his own investigations, should himself play sexton to his dead and buried subject, and with his own privy paw, dig it up again. It was the least one would expect of him.

  Yet here was this young American friend of his – and with the most endearing enthusiasm in the world – calmly devolving this little obligation on himself. Ronnie had agreed, of course, that James Cotton’s poems were worth excavation, and that could hardly be said of most of his contemporaries. Brief life was here their portion. And though a few of them were still alive, their works were almost as dead as mutton. Not so James Cotton: precisely the reverse in fact. His achievement had been rivalled only by his promise – a promise, however, which could scarcely be said to have been kept, since after the publication of that first ‘slender’ volume – to use the reviewers’ unanimous epithet – it had dwindled away into a mere pamphlet, the contents of which had been luminous enough in sparks, but in general so obscure as to be almost disconcerting.

  What these later poems ‘promised’ – and four whole years separated the two books – well, Ronnie couldn’t for the life of him imagine. It was veiled in an Egyptian darkness. Not that he knew even the little of James Cotton there was to know by heart. By no means. He felt a little conscience-stricken at thought of it – just in case in an hour or two he might be in for a catechism on the subject.

  The truth was, of course, that in American seats of learning nowadays there are not nearly enough themes-for-theses to go round. You can hardly see literature for the littérateurs. For that very reason it was a stroke of pure luck for his young friend to have chanced on James Cotton. Except for an article – ‘an appreciation’ – published about nine years before in one of the heavier reviews, James was still practically virgin soil. And what an owlish and incredible performance that had been.

  Take, for example, the lovely country in which Ronnie was now disporting himself. There hadn’t been a single word in the article from start to finish to suggest what delightfully Blake-like surroundings the young poet had enjoyed in his childhood. The little shallow stream that was now tinkling at Ronnie’s side over its sunny stones beneath a screen of vast-boughed elms with their clanking chaffinches; that hill over there, almost gaudy from crown to base with budded larch – it was all so rich, so gentle and so deliciously English.

  And then, after the barest mention of Ashenham, to have asserted that the poet had gone and died in foreign parts! Byron and Shelley were exiles, of course, and so was Landor. Keats had gone to die in Rome. Cyril Charlton in his paper had been eloquence itself about all that. But Trinidad! Ronnie, all alone as he was, all but burst out laughing at the sound of the syllables in his mind. A charming asphaltic island, no doubt, but if you were pulling the long and sentimental bow why not have said Tobago – which has at least a pleasing suggestion of tapioca. But Trinidad! Those dreadful d’s – like the slabs of a sarcophagus.

  And his enthusiastic young American friend in every single letter on the subject had been so emphatic about Trinidad. He had even coquetted with the prospect of embarking for Port of Spain to look up the poet’s inscription on his tomb-stone. How deliciously naïve. But Ronnie knew better. Wherever else his James Cotton may have deceased – he waggled his cane in the air to emphasize the point – he hadn’t closed his eyes for the last time on that island. And, among other little duties, Ronnie was now well on his way to prove it.

  He smiled to himself and, as there was plenty of time if he was to arrive at a polite hour, he came to a standstill again, and stooping his slightly tubby figure over the warm lichenous stones of the little old bridge, gazed into the amber running water beneath. Minnows – he watched them disporting themselves in their watery sun-dappled shallows, and almost subsided into a day-dream. The simple little fishes had reminded Ronnie that he had once been young himself, and was now, well, getting middle-aged. Whither had fled their visionary gleam? In those far years they wouldn’t have reminded him of whitebait! Yet Ronnie, too, in his salad days had published a sheaf of essays.

  Yes. But what ages ago they seemed, and how raw a Ronnie then! One can’t really live in two worlds at once. Yet even the most dilettantish of interests in some other than the prosperous one he was now occupying was, perhaps, better than none. A faint splendour lightened his mission. Whatever else he might have been, James Cotton’s venture into poetry had been the real thing. And now Ronnie was on his way to inquire exactly how and when and where and why, and so on. A literary Sherlock Holmes.

  With a look that might almost be described as grumpy he abandoned the minnows and went on. And now the stream had left him, fa lero lero loo. It had sallied off under a low-vaulted arch, danced over with reflected sunbeams, and a high stone wall flanking the lane had taken its place; an old wall too, with a rain-worn stone coping and with clumps of matted ivy and valerian bunching over it here and there.

  ‘A little cottage girl’ in a pinafore and with lank strands of yellow hair was approaching. When Ronnie asked for ‘Willows’ she put her finger into her mouth and, gazing at him out of forget-me-not blue eyes, pointed mutely to a gateway not thirty yards distant. She might have come straight out of We are Seven. Ronnie smiled at her as cherubically as he could manage, and yet, though he could not have said why, out of a mist of misgivings.

  ‘Don’t for Jehoshaphat’s sake write to these Cotton people,’ his young American friend had implored him. ‘Even that Charlton guy seems to have been a little dubious about his reception. And no wonder! He is deadly effusive under that mincing style; but after that, if they had any warning they might stave you off for good. As I say, it’s ten to one there will be nobody to remember J.C. now, but please be a dear and make sure. It would be no end of a scoop if I could get really fresh new-laid first-hand stuff about him – all his little ways and wiles, a few private letters par excellence, and photographs, of course. He seems to have been a hermit even in his twenties, and who knows what queer fish may not have shared his pond. But for heaven’s sake don’t write to them; just press the button and say you’ve come. You’ll know best, of course; and this is sheer hippopotamus talk.’

  This, of course, as Ronnie had decided at the time, was all very nice and exuberant and pleasant and characteristic. But now, as – after surveying the one faint word ‘Willows’ on the old green paint – he pushed the gate open, and turned in on the weedy path, he couldn’t help noticing that he felt a little self-conscious, even gauche. The very grass, the bead-bright moss on the pebbles, hinted seclusion. Even th
e blackbirds seemed to be surprised to see a visitor. The rustic lettering of that ‘Willows’, the serenity and unnoticeableness of it all – Ronnie all but then and there experienced a change of heart.

  Even if one does publish a book of poems when one is scarcely out of one’s teens – i.e., even if one does scatter one’s pearls before a public that much prefers wash, it doesn’t in itself exactly justify any more fastidious enquirer from the country of the Gadarenes in pushing his nose in years after one has died and been buried in Trinidad, merely to pick up tasty bits of gossip for a thesis! Good heavens, what deeds are done in thy name, O Muses!

  The path wound round. The persistent shallow stream rippled into view again, and over there, across a verdant meadow, not yet in the buttercup stage, stood bushed in beauty – not a few crazy old pollard relics of willows, but a full-boughed bountiful grove of them. And a little to eastward of them, in the haze of the afternoon sun, lay a smallish, low-roofed, quite ordinary-looking, quiet and glinting country house. Not very old, but, on the other hand, not very new.

  Some poets have opened their eyes for the first time on the amenities of Camberwell; some, on those of Chicago. Weeds may flourish, with an effort, in a gravel path. But little James Cotton had been fortunate indeed in the place where he was born, even though there appeared to be no surplus income just now to keep it up. No actual neglect, but obviously no under-gardener. Did thick creepers make a house damp or did they keep the bricks dry? It was one of the two, but Ronnie couldn’t remember which. And anyhow, the Pyrus japonica, with its shallow-cupped wine-red flowers, and the bushy-bloomed laurustinus did not seem to mind.

  Ronnie took it all in, though his eyes remained discreetly downcast, just in case he was being observed from the windows. Better no appearance of boldness. And so, cane in hand, light overcoat over arm, he stepped at last into the embowered porch, and gave a vigorous tug at the twisted iron bell-pull. Its distant tinkling dwindled away, and except, as he fancied, for the sound of a firm but hasty footstep that had immediately followed it, only the shrillings of the skylarks overhead now broke the quiet.