Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Until this moment they had been merely eyeing one another while time’s sluggish moments ebbed away. They had been merely ‘looking at’ one another. Now there had entered those glazed dark fixed blue eyes the very self within. It stayed there gazing out at him transfixed – the pleading, tormented, dangerous spirit within that intangible husk. And then the crisis was over. With a slow dragging movement of his head Alan had at last succeeded in breaking the spell – he had turned away. A miserable disquietude and self-repulsion possessed him. He felt sick, body and soul. He had but one thought – to free himself once and for all from this unwarranted ordeal. Why should he have been singled out? What hint of any kind of ‘encouragement’ had he been responsible for? Or was this ghostly encounter an experience that had been shared by other visitors to the old bookseller’s sanctum – maybe less squeamish than himself? His chilled, bloodless fingers clenched on the open page of the book beneath them. He strove in vain to master himself, to fight the thing out. It was as if an icy hand had him in its grip, daring him to stir.

  The evening wind had died with the fading day. The three poplars, every budded double-curved twig outlined against the glassy grey of the west, stood motionless. Daylight, even dusk, was all very well, but supposing this presence, as the dark drew on, ventured a little nearer? And suddenly his alarms – as much now of the body as of the mind – were over. She had been interrupted.

  A footstep had sounded in the corridor. Alan started to his feet. The handle of the door had turned in the old brass lock; he watched it. With a jerk he twisted his head on his shoulders. He was alone. Yet again the interrupter had rattled impatiently with the door handle. Alan at last managed to respond to the summons. But even as he grasped the handle on his own side of it, the door was pushed open against him and a long-bearded face peered through.

  ‘Pardon,’ said this stranger, ‘I didn’t realize you had locked yourself in.’

  In the thin evening twilight that was now their only illumination Alan found himself blushing like a schoolgirl.

  ‘But I hadn’t,’ he stammered. ‘Of course not. The catch must have jammed. I came in here myself only a few minutes ago.’

  The long face with its rather watery blue-grey eyes placidly continued to survey him in the dusk. ‘And yet, you know,’ its owner drawled, with a soupçon of incredulity, ‘I should have guessed myself that I have been poking about in our patron’s shop out there for at least the best part of half an hour. But that, of course, is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture. You haven’t chanced, I suppose, on a copy of the Vulgar Errors – Sir Thomas Browne?’

  Alan shook his head. ‘The B’s, I think, are in that corner,’ he replied, ‘– alphabetical. But I didn’t notice the Errors.’

  Nor did he stay to help his fellow-customer find the volume. He hurried out, and this time he had no spoil to present to the old bookseller in recognition of the rent due for his occupation of the parlour.

  A whole week went by, its last few days the battleground of a continuous conflict of mind. He hadn’t, he assured himself with the utmost conviction, the faintest desire in the world to set eyes again on – on what he had set eyes on. That was certain. It had been the oddest of shocks to what he had thought about things, to what had gone before, and, yes, to his vanity. Besides, the more he occupied himself with and pondered over his peculiar little experience the more probable it seemed that it and she and everything connected with her had been nothing but a cheat of the senses, a triumph of self-deception – a pure illusion, induced by the quiet, the solitude, the stirrings of springtime at the window, the feeling of age in the room, the romantic associations – and last, to the Herrick!

  All this served very well in the middle of the morning or at two o’clock in the afternoon. But a chance waft of the year’s first waxen hyacinths, the onset of evening, a glimpse of the waning moon – at any such oblique reminder of what had happened, these pretty arguments fell flat as a house of cards. Illusion! Then why had everything else in his life become by comparison so empty of interest and himself at a loose end? The thought of Mr Elliott’s bookshop at such moments was like an hypnotic lure. Cheat himself as he might, he knew it was only cheating. Distrust the fowler as he might, he knew what nets he was in. How gross a folly to be at the mercy of one vehement coupling of glances. If only it had been that other face! And yet, supposing he were wrong about all this; supposing this phantasm really was in need of help, couldn’t rest, had come back for something – there were things one might want to come back for – and even for something which he alone could give?

  What wonder this restless conflict of mind reacted on his body and broke his sleep? Naturally a little invalidish in his appetite, Alan now suffered the pangs of a violent attack of indigestion. And at last he could endure himself no longer. On the following Tuesday he once more pushed open the outer door of Mr Elliott’s bookshop, with its jangling bell, and entered, hot and breathless, from out of the pouring rain.

  ‘There was a book I caught sight of,’ he panted out to the old gentleman as he came in, ‘when I was here last, you know. In the other room. I won’t keep you a minute.’

  At this, the bookseller’s bland eye fixed itself an instant on the fair flushed face, almost as if he too could a tale unfold.

  ‘Let me take your umbrella, sir,’ he entreated. ‘Sopping! A real downpour. But very welcome to the farmers, I’ll be bound – if for once in a while they’d only say so. No hurry whatever, sir.’

  Downpour indeed it was. As Alan entered the parlour the cold, sullen gush of rain on the young lilac buds and cobblestones of the little yard in the dreary leaden light at the window resounded steadily on. He had set out in the belief that his one desire was to prove that his ‘ghost’ was no ghost at all, that he had been the victim of a pure hallucination. Yet throughout his journey, with only his umbrella for company, he had been conscious of a thrill of excitement and expectation. And now that he had closed the door behind him, and had shut himself in, the faded little room in this obscurity at once began to influence his mind in much the same fashion as the livid gloom of an approaching thunderstorm affects the scenery of the hills and valleys over which it broods.

  And this, it soon seemed, was to be his sole reward! His excitement fizzled out. With every passing moment his heart fell lower. He had gone away filled with a stark irrational hatred of the poor, restless, phantasmal creature who had intruded on his solitude. He had come back only to realize not only that she herself had been his lodestone, but that, even though any particular spot may undoubtedly be ‘haunted’, it by no means follows that its ghost is always at home. Everything about him seemed to have changed a little. Or was the change only in himself? In this damp air the room smelt of dry-rot and mouldering leather. Even the pretty grate looked thicklier scurfed with rust. And the books on the shelves had now taken to themselves the leaden livery of the weather. ‘Look not too closely on us,’ they seemed to cry. ‘What are we all but memorials of the dead? And we too are swiftly journeying towards the dust.’

  The prospect from the window was even more desolating. Nonetheless Alan continued to stare stupidly out of it. By the time he had turned away again he had become certain – though how he couldn’t tell – that he need have no apprehension whatever of intangible company today. Mr Elliott’s ‘parlour’ was emptier than he supposed a room could be. It seemed as if by sheer aversion for its late inmate he had exorcised it, and, irrational creature that he was, a stab of regret followed.

  He turned to go. He gave a last look round – and paused. Was it that the skies had lightened a little or had he really failed to notice at his entry that the door at which his visitor had appeared was a few inches open? He stepped across softly and glanced up the staircase. Only vacancy there too. But that door was also ajar. The two faint daylights from above and below mingled midway. For a moment or two he hesitated. The next he had stolen swiftly and furtively up the staircase and had looked in.

  This room was not only empty bu
t abandoned. It was naked of any stick of furniture and almost of any trace of human occupation. Yet with its shallow bow window, low ceiling, and morning sun it must once in its heyday have blossomed like the rose. The flowered paper on its walls was dingy now; a few darker squares and oblongs alone showed where pictures had once hung. The brass gas bracket was green with verdigris, and a jutting rod was the only evidence of the canopy where once a bed had been.

  But even vacancy may convey a sense of age and tell its tale. Alan was looking into the past. Indeed, the stale remnant of some once pervasive perfume still hung in the musty atmosphere of the room, though its sole refuse consisted of a few dust-grimed books in a corner and – on a curved white narrow shelf that winged the minute fireplace – a rusty hairpin.

  Alan stooped, and very gingerly, with gloved finger and thumb, turned the books over – a blistered green-bound Enoch Arden, a small thick copy of The Mysteries of Paris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life, a Nightingale Valley, a few damp, fly-blown shockers, some of them in French and paper-bound; and last, a square black American cloth-bound exercise book with E.F. cut out with a clumsy penknife at one of the top corners. The cockled cloth was slightly greened.

  He raised the cover with the extreme tips of his fingers, stooped forward a little, and found himself in the window-light scanning with peculiar intensity the vanishing lineaments of a faded photograph – the photograph of a young woman in clothes somehow made the more old-fashioned in appearance by the ravages of time and light on the discoloured cardboard. He knew this face; and yet not this face. For days past it had not been out of his mind for more than a few hours together. But while his first impression had been that of the vivid likeness of the one to the other, what next showed clearest were the differences between them. Differences that stirred his heart into a sudden tumult.

  The hair in the photograph was dressed in pretty much the same fashion – drawn up and back from the narrow temples across the widening head. The lips were, possibly, not so full; certainly not so dark. And though the cheek even of this much younger face was a little sunken, these faded eyes – a fading only of the paper depicting them and not of age – looked out at him without the faintest trace of boldness or effrontery. They were, it is true, fixed profoundly on his own. But they showed no interest in him, little awareness, no speculation – only a remote settled melancholy. What strange surmises, the young man reflected, must the professional photographer at times indulge in when from beneath his ink-black inquisitorial velvet cowl he peers into his camera at a face as careless of human curiosity as this had been. The young woman in the photograph had made, if any, a more feeble attempt to conceal her secret sorrows than a pall to conceal its bier or a broken sepulchre its bones.

  At a breath the young man’s aversion had died away. A shame-stricken compassion of which he had never dreamed himself capable had swept over him in its stead. He gazed on for a minute or two at the photograph – this withering memento which not even the removing men seemed to have considered worth flinging into a dustbin; then he opened the book at random – towards the middle of it – and leaning into the light at the window read these lines:

  My midnight lamp burns dim with shame,

  In Heaven the moon is low;

  Sweet sharer of its secret flame,

  Arise, and go!

  Haste, for dawn’s envious gaping grave

  Bids thee not linger here;

  Though gone is all I am, and have –

  Thy ghost once absent, dear.

  He read them over again, then glanced stealthily up and out. They were a voice from the dead. It was as if he had trespassed into the echoing cold of a vault. And as he looked about him he suddenly realized that at any moment he might be interrupted, caught – prying. With a swift glance over his shoulder he pushed the photograph back into the old exercise book, and tucking this under his arm beneath his coat, tiptoed down the unlighted stairs into the parlour.

  It had been a bold venture – at least for Alan. For, of all things in this world he disliked, he disliked by far the most being caught out in any little breach of the conventions. Suppose that old, cod-like Mrs Elliott had caught him exploring this abandoned bedroom? After listening yet again for any rumour either of herself or of her husband, he drew out from the lowest shelf near by two old sheepskin folios, seated himself in full view of the door that led into the shop, and having hidden the exercise book well within cover of these antiquated tomes he began to turn over its pages. The trick took him back to his early schooldays – the sun, the heat, the drone of bees at the window, a settling wayward fly, the tick of the clock on the wall, and the penny ‘blood’ half concealed in his arithmetic book. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t he being kept in now? And how very odd he should be minding so little what, only an hour before, he had foreseen he would be minding so much. How do ghosts show that you needn’t expect them? Not even in their chosen haunts?

  The book he was now examining was not exactly a penny ‘blood’. In spite of appearances it must have cost at least sixpence. The once black ink on its pages had faded, and mildew dappled the leaves. The handwriting was irregular, with protracted loops. And what was written in the book consisted of verses, interlarded with occasional passages in prose, and a day or a date here and there, and all set down apparently just as it had taken the writer’s fancy. And since many of the verses were heavily corrected and some of them interlined, Alan concluded – without any very unusual acumen! – that they were home made. Moreover, on evidence as flimsy as this, he had instantly surmised who this E.F. was, and that here was not only her book but a book of her own authorship. So completely, too, had his antipathy to the writer of it now vanished out of memory, so swiftly had the youthful, tragic face in the photograph secreted itself in his sentiments, that he found himself reading these scribbled ‘effusions’ with a mind all but bereft of its critical faculties. And of these the young man had hitherto rather boasted himself.

  Still, poetry, good or bad, depends for its very life on the hospitable reader, as tinder awaits the spark. After that, what else matters? The flame leaps, the bosom glows! And as Alan read on he never for an instant doubted that here, however faultily expressed, was what the specialist is apt to call ‘a transcript of life’. He knew of old – how remotely of old it now seemed – what feminine wiles are capable of; but here, surely, was the truth of self to self. He had greedily and yet with real horror looked forward to his reappearance here, as if Mr Elliott’s little parlour was the positive abode of the Evil One. And yet now that he was actually pecking about beneath the very meshes of his nets, he was drinking in these call-notes as if they were cascading down upon him out of the heavens from the throat of Shelley’s skylark itself. For what is Time to the artifices of Eros? Had he not (with Chaucer’s help) once fallen head over ears in love with the faithless Criseyde? He drank in what he had begun to read as if his mind were a wilderness thirsty for rain, though the pall of cloud that darkened the window behind him was supplying it in full volume. He was elated and at the same time dejected at the thought that he was perhaps the very first human creature, apart from the fountain head, to sip of these secret waters.

  And he had not read very far before he realized that its contents referred to an actual experience as well as to one of the imagination. He realized too that the earlier poems had been written at rather long intervals; and, though he doubted very much if they were first attempts, that their technique tended to improve as they went on – at least, that of the first twenty poems or so. With a small ivory pocket paper-knife which he always carried about with him he was now delicately separating page 12 from page 13, and he continued to read at random:

  There was sweet water once,

  Where in my childhood I

  Watched for the happy innocent nonce

  Day’s solemn clouds float by.

  O age blur not that glass;

  Kind Heaven still shed thy rain;

  Even now sighs shake me as I pass />
  Those gentle haunts again.

  He turned over the page:

  Lullay, my heart, and find thy peace

  Where thine old solitary pastures lie;

  Their light, their dews need never cease,

  Nor sunbeams from on high.

  Lullay, and happy dream, nor roam,

  Wild though the hills may shine,

  Once there, thou soon would’st long for home,

  As I for mine!

  and then:

  Do you see; O, do you see? –

  Speak – and some inward self that accent knows,

  Bidding the orient East its rose disclose –

  And daybreak wake in me.

  Do you hear? O, do you hear? –

  This heart whose pulse like menacing night-bird cries?

  Dark, utter dark, my loved, is in these eyes

  When gaunt good-bye draws near.

  and then, after a few more pages:

  ‘There is a garden in her face’:

  My face! Woe’s me were that my all! –

  Nay, but my self, though thine its grace,

  Thy fountain is, thy peach-bloomed wall.

  Come soon that twilight dusky hour,

  When thou thyself shalt enter in

  And take thy fill of every flower,

  Since thine they have always been.