Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Besides, we had had words again, and though I can stretch a point with a friend and no harm done, I’m not a man to come coneying and currying favour. Let him get his own drinks, was my feeling in the matter. And you can hardly call me to blame if he did. There was the pantry window hanging wide open in the shade of the trees – and day after day of scorching sun and not a breath to breathe. And there was the ruin of him within arm’s reach from outside, and a water tap handy, too. Very inviting, I’ll allow.

  ‘I’m not attesting, mind you, that he was confirmed at it, no more than that I’m a man to be measuring what’s given me to take charge of by tenths of inches. It’s the principle of the thing. You might have thought, too, that a simple honest pride would have kept him back. Nothing of the sort; and no matter, wine or spirits. I’d watch him there, though he couldn’t see me, being behind the door. And practices like that, sir, as you will agree with me, can’t go on. They couldn’t go on, vicarage or no vicarage. Besides, from being secret it began to be open. It had gone too far. Brazen it out: that was the lay. I came down one fine morning to find one of my best decanters smashed to smithereens on the stone floor, Irish glass and all. Cats and sherry, who ever heard of it? And out of revenge he filled the pantry with wasps by bringing in over-ripe plums. Petty waste of time like that. And some of the green-houses thick with blight!

  ‘And so things went, from bad to worse, and at such a pace as I couldn’t have credited. A widower, too, with a married daughter dependent on him; which is worse even than a wife, who expects to take the bad with the good. No, sir, I had to call a halt to it. A friendly word in his ear, or keeping everything out of his reach, you may be thinking, might have sufficed. Believe me, not for him. And how can you foster such a weakness by taking steps out of the usual to prevent it? It wouldn’t be proper to your self-respect. Then I thought of George; not compromising myself in any way, of course, in so doing. George had a face as long as your arm, pale and solemn, enough to make a cat laugh. Dress him up in a surplice and hassock, he might have been the Reverend’s curate. Strange that, for a youth born in the country. But curate or no curate, he had eyes in his head and must have seen what there was to be seen.

  ‘I said to him one day, and I remember him standing there in the pantry in his black coat against the white of the cupboard paint, I said to him, “George, a word in time saves nine, but it would come better from you than from me. You take me? Hold your peace till our friend’s sober again and can listen to reason. Then hand it over to him – a word of warning, I mean. Say we are muffling things up as well as we can from the old gentleman, but that if he should hear of it there’d be fat in the fire; and no mistake. He would take it easier from you, George, the responsibility being mine.”

  ‘Lord, how I remember George! He had a way of looking at you as if he couldn’t say boh to a goose – swollen hands and bolting blue eyes, as simple as an infant’s. But he wasn’t stupid, oh no. Nobody could say that. And now I reflect, I think he knew our little plan wouldn’t carry very far. But there, whatever he might be thinking, he was so awkward with his tongue that he could never find anything to say until it was too late, so I left it at that. Besides, I had come to know he was, with all his faults, a young man you could trust for doing what he was told to do. So, as I say, I left it at that.

  ‘What he actually did say I never knew. But as for its being of any use, it was more like pouring paraffin on a bonfire. The very next afternoon our friend came along to the pantry window and stood there looking in – swaying he was, on his feet; and I can see the midges behind him zigzagging in a patch of sunshine as though they were here before my very eyes. He was so bad that he had to lay hold of the sill to keep himself from falling. Not thirst this time, but just fury. And then, seeing that mere flaunting of fine feathers wasn’t going to inveigle me into a cockfight, he began to talk. Not all bad language, mind you – that’s easy to shut your ears to – but cold reasonable abuse, which isn’t. At first I took no notice, went on about my business at my leisure, and no hurry. What’s the use of arguing with a man, and him one of these Scotchmen to boot, that’s beside himself with rage? What was wanted was peace in the house, if only for the old gentleman’s sake, who I thought was definitely under the weather and had been coming on very poorly of late.

  ‘“Where’s that George of yours?” he said to me at last – with additions. “Where’s that George? Fetch him out, and I’ll teach him to come playing the holy Moses to my own daughter. Fetch him out, I say, and we’ll finish it here and now.” And all pitched high, and half his words no more English than the mewing of a cat.

  ‘But I kept my temper and answered him quite moderate and as pleasantly as I knew how. “I don’t want to meddle in anybody’s quarrels,” I said. “So long as George so does his work in this house as will satisfy my eye, I am not responsible for his actions in his off-time and out of bounds.”

  ‘How was I to know, may I ask, if it was not our Mr Mengus who had smashed one of my best decanters? What proof was there? What reason had I for thinking else?

  ‘“George is a quiet, unbeseeming young fellow,” I said, “and if he thinks it’s his duty to report any misgoings-on either to me or to the Reverend, it doesn’t concern anybody else.”

  ‘That seemed to sober my fine gentleman. Mind you, I’m not saying that there was anything unremidibly wrong with him. He was a first-class gardener. I grant you that. But then he had an uncommonly good place to match – first-class wages; and no milk, wood, coals or house-rent to worry about. But breaking out like that, and the Reverend poorly and all; that’s not what he thought of when he put us all down in his will. I’ll be bound of that. Well, there he stood, looking in at the window and me behind the table in my apron as calm as if his wrangling meant no more to me than the wind in the chimmeny. It was the word “report”, I fancy, that took the wind out of his sails. It had brought him up like a station buffer. And he was still looking at me, and brooding it over, as though he had the taste of poison on his tongue.

  ‘Then he says very quiet, “So that’s his little game, is it? You are just a pair, then?”

  ‘“If by pair you’re meaning me,” I said, “well, I’m ready to take my share of the burden when it’s ready to fit my back. But not before. George may have gone a bit beyond himself, but he meant well, and you know it.”

  ‘“What I am asking is this,” says our friend, “have you ever seen me the worse for liquor? Answer me that!”

  ‘“If I liked your tone better,” I said, “I wouldn’t say how I don’t see why it would be necessarily the worse.”

  ‘“Ehh? You mean, Yes, then?” he said.

  ‘“I mean no more than what I say,” I answered him, looking at him over the cruet as straight as I’m looking at you now. “I don’t ask to meddle with your private affairs, and I’ll thank you not to come meddling with mine.” He seemed taken aback at that, and I noticed he was looking a bit pinched, and hollow under the eyes. Sleepless nights, perhaps.

  ‘But how was I to know this precious grandson of his was out of sorts with a bad throat and that – seeing that he hadn’t mentioned it till a minute before? I ask you! “The best thing you and George there can do,” I went on, “is to bury the hatchet; and out of hearing of the house, too.”

  ‘With that I turned away and went off into it myself, leaving him there to think things over at his leisure. I am putting it to you, sir, as a free witness, what else could I have done?’

  There was little light of day left in our cavernous waiting-room by this time. Only the dulling glow of the fire and the phosphorescence caused by a tiny bead of gas in the ‘mantles’ of the great iron bracket over our heads. My realist seemed to be positively in want of an answer to this last question. But as I sat looking back into his intent small face nothing that could be described as of a helpful nature offered itself.

  ‘If he was anxious about his grandson,’ I ventured at last, ‘it might explain his being a little short in temper. Besides
… But I should like to hear what came after.’

  ‘What came after, now?’ the little man repeated, drawing his right hand gingerly out of the depths of his pocket and smoothing down his face with it as if he had suddenly discovered he was tired. ‘Well, a good deal came after, but not quite what you might have expected. And you’d hardly go so far as to say perhaps that anxiety over his grandson would excuse him for what was little short of manslaughter, and him a good six inches to the good at that? Keeping facts as facts, if you’ll excuse me, our friend waylaid George by the stables that very evening, and a wonderful peaceful evening it was, shepherd’s delight and all that. But to judge from the looks of the young fellow’s face when he came into the house there hadn’t been much of that in the quarter of an hour they had had together.

  ‘I said, “Sponge it down, George, sponge it down. And by good providence maybe the old gentleman won’t notice anything wrong.” It wasn’t to reason I could let him off his duties and enter into a lot of silly peravications which in the long run might only make things worse. It’s that you have to think of when you are a man in my position. But as for the Reverend’s not noticing it, there, as luck would have it, I was wrong myself.

  ‘For when the two of us were leaving the dining-room that evening after the table had been cleared and the dessert put on, he looked up from round the candles and told George to stay behind. Some quarter of an hour after that George came along to me snuffling as if he’d been crying. But I asked no questions, not me; and, as I say, he was always pretty slow with his tongue. All that I could get out of him was that he had decocted some cock-and-bull story to account for his looks the like of which nobody in his senses could credit, let alone such a power of questioning as the old gentleman could bring to bear when roused, and apart from what comes, I suppose, from reading so many books. So the fat was in the fire and no mistake. And the next thing I heard, after coming back late the following evening, was that our Mr Mengus had been called into the house and given the sack there and then, with a quarter’s wages in lieu of notice. Which, after all, mind you, was as good as three-quarters a gift. What I’m saying is that handsome is as handsome does, and that was the Reverend all over; though I agree, mind you, even money isn’t necessarily everything when there’s what they call character to be taken into account. But if ever there was one of the quality fair and upright in all his dealings, as the saying goes, then that was the Reverend Somers. And I abide by that. He wouldn’t have any truck with drink topped with insolence. That’s all.

  ‘Well, our friend came rapping at the back door that evening, shaken to the marrow if ever man was, and just livid. I told him, and I meant it too, that I was sorry for what had occurred: “It’s a bad ending,” I said, “to a tale that ought never to have been told.” I told him too, speaking as quiet and pleasant as I am to you now, that the only hope left was to let bygones be bygones; that he had already had his fingers on George, and better go no further. Not he. He said, and he was sober enough then in all conscience, that, come what come may, here or hereafter, he’d be even with him. Ay, and he made mention of me also, but not so rabid. A respectable man, too; never a word against him till then; and not far short of sixty. And by rabid I don’t mean violent. He spoke as low and quiet as if there was a judge on the bench there to hear him, sentence said and everything over. And then …’

  The old creature paused until yet another main-line train had gone roaring on its way. ‘And then,’ he continued, ‘though he wasn’t found till morning, he must have gone straight out – and good-bye said to nobody. He must, I say, have gone straight out to the old barn and hanged himself. The midmost rafter, sir, and a drop that would have sufficed for a Giant Goliath. All night. And it’s my belief, good-bye or no good-bye, that it wasn’t so much the disgrace of the affair but his daughter – Mrs Shaw by name – and his grandson that were preying on his mind. And yet – why, he never so much as asked me to say a good word for him! Not one.

  ‘Well, that was the end of that. So far. And it’s a curious thing to me – though they say these Romans aren’t above making use of it – how, going back over the past clears everything up like; at least for the time being. But it’s what you were saying just now about what’s solid that sets me thinking and keeps repeating itself in my mind. Solid was the word you used. And they look it, I agree.’ He deliberately twisted his head and fastened a prolonged stare on the bench on which he had been seated. ‘But it doesn’t follow there’s much comfort in them even if they are. Solid or not, they go at last when all’s said to what’s little else but gas and ashes once they’re fallen to pieces and been put on the fire. Which holds good, and even more so, for them that sit on them. Peculiar habit that, too – sitting! Yes, I’ve been told, sir, that after what they call this cremation, and all the moisture in us gone up in steam, what’s left would scarcely turn the scales by a single hounce!’

  If sitting is a peculiar habit, it was even more peculiar how etherealizing the effect of my new acquaintance’s misplaced aspirate had been – his one and only lapse in this respect throughout his interminable monologue.

  ‘Yes, they say that so far as this solid goes, we amount to no more than what you could put into a walnut. And my point, sir,’ he was emphasizing with a forefinger that only just showed itself beyond the long sleeve of his greatcoat, ‘my point is this – that if that’s all there is to you and me, we shouldn’t need much of the substantial for what you might call the mere sole look of things, if you follow me, if we chose or chanced to come back. When gone, I mean. Just enough, I suppose, to be obnoxious, as the Reverend used to say, to the naked eye.

  ‘But all that being as it may be, the whole thing had tided over, and George was pretty nearly himself again, and another gardener advertised for – and I must say the Reverend, though after this horrible affair he was never the same man again, treated the young woman I mentioned as if he himself had been a father – I say, the whole thing had tided over, and the house was as silent as a tomb again, ay, as the sepulchre itself; when I began to notice something peculiar.

  ‘At first maybe, little more than mere silence. What, in the contrast, as a matter of fact, I took for peace. But afterwards not so. There was a strain, so to speak, as you went about your daily doings. A strain. And especially after dark. It may have been only in one’s head. I can’t say. But it was there: and I could see without watching that even George had noticed it, and he’d hardly notice a black-beetle on a pancake.

  ‘And at last there came something you could put word to, catch in the act, so to speak. I had gone out towards the cool of the evening after a broiling hot day, to get a little air. There was a copse of beeches, which as perhaps you may know, is a very pleasant tree for shade, sir, at a spot a bit under the mile from the back of the vicarage. And I sat there quiet for a minute or two, with the birds and all – they were beginning to sing again, I remember – and – you know how memory strays back, though sometimes it’s more like a goat tethered to a peg on a common – I was thinking over what a curious thing it is how one man’s poison is another man’s meat. For the funeral over, and all that, the old gentleman had thanked me for all I had done. You see what had gone before had been a hard break in his trust of a man, and he looked up from his bed at me almost with tears in his eyes. He said he wouldn’t forget it. He used the word substantial, sir; and I ought by rights to have mentioned that he was taken ill the night of the inquest; a sort of stroke, the doctor called it, though he came round, I must say, remarkably well considering his age.

  ‘Well, I had been thinking over all this on the fringe of the woods there, and was on my way back again to the house by the field-path, when I looked up as if at call and saw what I take my oath I never remembered to have seen there before – a scarecrow. A scarecrow – and that right in the middle of the cornfield that lay beyond the stream with the bulrushes at the back of the house. Nothing funny in that, you may say. Quite so. But mark me, this was early September, and the stubble all bleac
hing in the sun, and it didn’t look an old scarecrow, either. It stood up with its arms out and an old hat down over its eyes, bang in the middle of the field, its back to me, and its front to the house. I knew that field as well as I know my own face in the looking-glass. Then how could I have missed it? What wonder then I stood stock still and had a good long stare at it, first because, as I say, I had never seen it before, and next because – but I’ll be coming to that later.

  ‘That done, and not to my satisfaction, I turned back a little and came along on the other side of the hedge, and so, presently at last, indoors. Then I stepped up to the upper storey to have a look at it from the windows. For you never know with these country people what they are up to, though they may seem stupid enough. Looked at from there, it wasn’t so much in the middle of the field as I had fancied, seeing it from the other side. But how, thought I to myself could you have escaped me, my friend, if you had been there all through the summer? I don’t see how it could; that’s flat. But if not, then it must have been put up more recently.

  ‘I had all but forgotten about it next morning, but as afternoon came on I went upstairs and had another look. There was less heat-haze or something, and I could see it clearer and nearer, so to speak, but not quite clear enough. So I whipped along to the Reverend’s study, him being still, poor gentleman, confined to his bed, in fact he never got up from it; I whipped along, I say, to the study to fetch his glasses, his boniculars, and I fastened them on that scarecrow like a microscope on a fly. You will hardly credit me, sir, when I say that what seemed to me then most different about it – different from what you might expect – was that it didn’t look in any ordinary manner of speaking, quite real.