Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  As they stood there, then, a brief silence had fallen on the ravaged room. And then a husky, querulous, censorious voice had broken out behind the pair of them: ‘Mr E., where are you?’

  * As printed in SEP (1938). First published in Two Tales, Bookman’s Journal, London, July 1925.

  The Orgy: An Idyll*

  It was a Wednesday morning, and May-day, and London – its West End too, crisp, brisk, scintillating. Even the horses had come out in their Sunday best. With their nosegays and ribbons and rosettes they might have been on their way to a wedding – the nuptials of Labour and Capital, perhaps. As for people, the wide pavements of the great street were packed with them. Not so many busy idlers of the one sex as of the other, of course, at this early hour – a top-hat here, a pearl-grey Homburg there; but of the feminine a host as eager and variegated as the butterflies in an Alpine valley in midsummer; some stepping daintily down from their landaulettes like ‘Painted Ladies’ out of the chrysalis, and thousands of others, blues and browns and speckleds and sables and tawnies and high-fliers and maiden’s blushes, from all parts of the world and from most of the suburbs, edging and eddying along, this way, that way, their eyes goggling, their tongues clacking, but most of them, their backs to the highway, gazing, as though mesmerized, in and through the beautiful plate-glass windows at the motley merchandise on the other side. And much of that on the limbs and trunks of beatific images almost as life-like but a good deal less active than themselves.

  The very heavens, so far as they could manage to peep under the blinds, seemed to be smiling at this plenty. Nor had they any need for care concerning the future, for nursemaids pushing their baby-carriages before them also paraded the pavements, their infant charges laid in dimpled sleep beneath silken awning and coverlet, while here and there a tiny tot chattered up into the air like a starling.

  A clock, probably a church clock, and only just audible, struck ten. The sun from its heights far up above the roof-tops blazed down upon the polished asphalt and walls with such an explosion of splendour that it looked as if everything had been repainted overnight with a thin coat of crystalline varnish and then sprinkled with frozen sea-water. And every human creature within sight seemed to be as heart-free and gay as this beautiful weather promised to be brief. Every human creature – with one exception only – poor Philip Pim.

  And why not? He was young – so young in looks, indeed, that if Adonis had been stepping along at his side they might have been taken for cousins. He was charmingly attired, too, from his little, round, hard felt hat – not unlike Mercury’s usual wear, but without the wings – to his neat brogue shoes; and he was so blond, with his pink cheeks and flaxen hair, that at first you could scarcely distinguish his silken eyebrows and eyelashes, though they made up for it on a second glance. Care seemed never to have sat on those young temples. Philip looked as harmless as he was unharmed.

  Alas! this without of his had no resemblance whatever to his within. He eyed vacantly a buzzing hive-like abandonment he could not share; first, because though he had the whole long day to himself he had no notion of what to do with it; and next, because only the previous afternoon the manager of the bank in which until then he had graced a stool specially reserved for him every morning, had shaken him by the hand and had wished him well – for ever. He had said how deeply he regretted Philip’s services could not be indulged in by the bank any longer. He would miss him. Oh yes, very much indeed – but missed Philip must be.

  The fact was that Philip had never been able to add up pounds, shillings, and pence so that he could be certain the total was correct. His 9’s, too, often looked like 7’s, his 5’s like 3’s. And as ‘simple addition’ was all but his sole duty in the bank, he would not have adorned its premises for a week if his uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim, had not been acquainted with one of its most stylish directors, and was not in the habit of keeping a large part of his ample fortune in its charge. He had asked Mr Bumbleton to give Philip a chance. But chances – some as rapidly as Manx cats – come to an end. And Philip’s had.

  Now, if Colonel Pim had sent his nephew when he was a small boy to a nice public school, he might have been able by this time to do simple sums very well indeed. Philip might have become an accurate adder-up. It is well to look on the bright side of things. Unfortunately when Philip was an infant, his health had not been very satisfactory – at least to his widowed mother – and he had been sent instead to a private academy. There a Mr Browne was the mathematical master – a Mr Browne so much attached to algebra and to reading The Times in school hours that he hadn’t much patience with the rudiments of arithmetic. ‘Just add it up,’ he would say, ‘and look up the answer. And if it isn’t right, do it again.’

  It was imprudent of him, but in these early years poor Philip had never so much as dreamed that some day he was going to spend all day on a stool. If he had, he might not perhaps have been so eager to look up the answers. But then, his uncle was both fabulously rich and apparently unmarriageable, and Philip was his only nephew. Why, then, should he ever have paid any attention to banks, apart from the variety on which the wild thyme grows?

  Term succeeded term, and still, though ‘a promising boy’, he remained backward – particularly in the last of the three R’s. And his holidays, so called, would be peppered with such problems as (a) If a herring and a half cost three halfpence, how many would you eat for a shilling? (b) If a brick weighs just a pound and half a brick, what does it weigh? (c) If Moses was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, etc; and (d) Uncles and brothers have I none, and so on. And since, after successive mornings with a sheet of foolscap and a stub of pencil, Philip’s answers would almost invariably reappear as (a) 18; (b) 1½ lb; (c) his sister, and (d) himself, Colonel Pim became more and more choleric and impolite, and Nature had long ago given him a good start.

  He had a way, too, when carpeting at Philip, of flicking his shepherd-plaid trouser-leg with his handkerchief which was highly alarming to everyone concerned. At last, instead of transferring his nephew from Mr Browne to Christ Church, Oxford, or to Trinity College, Cambridge, or to some less delectable resort at an outlying university, he first (before setting out in pursuit of big game all around the world), consigned him to a tutor, who thanked his lucky stars the expedition would take the Colonel a long time; and, on his return, he gave them both a prolonged vacation.

  And then had fallen the bolt from the blue. On the morning of his twenty-first birthday, which had promised to be so cool, so calm, so bright, Philip received a letter from his uncle. He opened it with joy; he read it with consternation. It was in terms as curt as they looked illegible, and it was merely to tell him that what the Colonel called a post (but which was, in fact, a high stool) had been secured for his nephew, and that unless Philip managed to keep his seat on it for twelve consecutive months he would be cut off with a shilling.

  Of these drear months about two and a half had somehow managed to melt away, and now not only was the stool rapidly following them into the limbo of the past, but at this very moment the Colonel was doubtless engaged, and with his usual zest, in keeping his promise. What wonder, then, Philip was not exactly a happy young man as he wandered this sunny populous May morning aimlessly on his way. There was nothing – apart from everything around him – to make him so, except only one minute stroke of luck that had befallen him before breakfast.

  When he had risen from his tumbled bed in his London lodgings, the sight of his striped bank trousers and his black bank coat and waistcoat had filled him with disgust. Opening the grained cupboard which did duty for a wardrobe – and in the indulgence of his tailor it was pretty full – he took down from a peg the festive suit he was now wearing, but which otherwise he had left unheeded since Easter. He found himself faintly whistling as he buttoned it on; but his delight can be imagined when, putting his finger and thumb into an upper waistcoat pocket, he discovered – a sovereign. And an excellent specimen of one, with St George in his mantle and the dragon on the one side of
it, and King Edward VII’s head – cut off at the neck as if he had sat to its designer in his bath – on the other. This, with four others very much like it, had been bestowed on Philip many months ago by his Uncle Charles – a maternal uncle, who had since perished in Paris. As the rest of Philip’s pockets contained only 7½d. in all, this coin – how forgotten, he simply could not conjecture – was treasure trove indeed.

  Now, poor Philip had never really cared for money. Perhaps he had always associated it with herrings and half-bricks. Perhaps he had never needed it quite enough. Since, moreover, immediately opposite his perch at the Bank there hung a framed antique picture of this commodity in process of being shovelled out of receptacles closely resembling coal-scuttles into great vulgar heaps upon a polished counter, and there weighed in brass scales like so much lard or glucose, he had come to like it less and less. On the other hand, he dearly enjoyed spending it. As with Adam and the happy birds in the Garden of Eden – linnet and kestrel and wren – he enjoyed seeing it fly. In this he was the precise antithesis of his uncle.

  Colonel Crompton Pim loved money. He exulted in it (not vocally, of course) en masse, as the Pharaohs exulted in pyramids. And he abhorred spending it. For this (and for many another) reason he had little affection for mere objects – apart, that is, from such objects as golf clubs, shooting boots, or hippopotamus-hoof inkstands, and he had not the smallest pleasure in buying anything for mere buying’s sake.

  His immense dormitory near Cheltenham, it is true, was full of furniture, but it was furniture, acquired in the ’sixties or thereabouts, for use and not for joy. Prodigious chairs with pigskin seats; tables of a solidity that defied time and of a wood that laughed at the worm; bedsteads of the Gog order; wardrobes resembling Assyrian sarcophagi; and ottomans which would seat with comfort and dignity a complete royal family. As for its ‘ornaments’, they came chiefly from Benares.

  And simply because poor Philip delighted in spending money and hated such horrible impedimenta with the contempt a humming-bird must feel for a black-pudding, he had never been able to take to his uncle – not even for the sake of what he owned. And it was impossible – as he fondly supposed – for any human being to take to him for any other reason. No, there was nothing in common between them, except a few branches of the family tree. And these the Colonel might already have converted into firewood.

  Now, as poor Philip meandered listlessly along the street, fingering his Uncle Charles’s golden sovereign in his pocket, he came on one of those gigantic edifices wherein you can purchase anything in the world – from a white elephant to a performing flea, from a cargo of coconuts to a tin-tack. This was the ‘store’ at which his uncle ‘dealt’. And by sheer force of habit, Philip mounted the welcoming flight of steps, crossed a large flat rubber mat, and went inside.

  Having thus got safely in, he at once began to ponder how he was to get safely out – with any fraction, that is, of his golden sovereign still in his pocket. And he had realized in the recent small hours that with so little on earth now left to spend, except an indefinite amount of leisure, he must strive to spend that little with extreme deliberation.

  So first, having breakfasted on a mere glance at the charred remnant of a kipper which his landlady had served up with his chicory, he entered a large gilded lift, or elevator, as the directors preferred to call it, en route to the restaurant. There he seated himself at a vacant table and asked the waitress to be so kind as to bring him a glass of milk and a bun. He nibbled, he sipped, and he watched the people – if people they really were, and not, as seemed more probable, automata intended to advertise the Ecclesiastical, the Sports, the Provincial, the Curio, the Export, and the Cast-Iron Departments.

  With his first sip of milk he all but made up his mind to buy a little parting present for his uncle. It would be at least a gentle gesture. With his second he decided that the Colonel would be even less pleased to receive a letter and, say, a velvet smoking-cap, or a pair of mother-of-pearl cuff-links, than just a letter. By the time he had finished his bun he had decided to buy a little something for himself. But try as he might he could think of nothing (for less than a guinea) that would be worthy of the shade of his beloved Uncle Charles. So having pushed seven-fifteenths of all he else possessed under his plate for his freckled waitress, with the remaining fourpence he settled his bill and went steadily downstairs. Nineteen minutes past ten – he would have a good look about him before he came to a decision.

  Hunger, it has been said, sharpens the senses, but it is apt also to have an edgy effect upon the nerves. If, then, Philip’s breakfast had been less exacting, or his lunch had made up for it, he might have spent the next few hours of this pleasant May morning as a young man should – in the open air. Or he might have visited the British Museum, the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey. He might never, at any rate, in one brief morning of his mortal existence have all but died again and again of terror, abandon, shame, rapture and incredulity. He might never – but all in good time.

  He was at a loose end, and it is then that habits are apt to prevail. And of all his habits, Philip’s favourite was that of ordering ‘goods’ on behalf of his uncle. The Colonel in his fantastic handwriting would post him two weekly lists – one consisting of the ‘wanted’, the other of complaints about the previous week’s ‘supplied’. Armed with these, Philip would set out for the building he was now actually in. The first list, though not a thing of beauty, was a joy as long as it lasted. The second, for he had always flatly refused to repeat his uncle’s sulphurous comments to any underling, he reserved for his old enemy, the secretary of the establishment, Sir Leopold Bull. And though in these weekly interviews Sir Leopold might boil with rage and chagrin, he never boiled over. For the name of Pim was a name of power in the secretary’s office. The name of Pim was that of a heavy shareholder; and what the Colonel wanted he invariably in the long run got. A chest, say, of Ceylon tea, ‘rich, fruity, bright infusion’; a shooting-stick (extra heavy Brugglesdon tube pattern); a double quart-size tantalus, with two double spring sterling silver Brahmin locks; a hundredweight of sago; a thousand black cheroots; a stymie, perhaps, or a click – something of that sort.

  These ‘order days’ had been the balm of Philip’s late existence. His eyes fixed on his ledger and his fancy on, say, ‘Saddlery’, or ‘Sports’, he looked forward to his Wednesdays – thirsted for them. Indeed, his chief regret at the bank, apart from little difficulties with his 9’s and 3’s, had been that his uncle’s stores were closed on Saturday afternoons. And on Sundays. His hobby had, therefore, frequently given him indigestion, since he could indulge it only between 1 and 2 p.m. It was a pity, of course, that Colonel Pim was a man of wants so few, and these of so narrow a range. Possibly the suns of India had burned the rest out of him. But for Philip, any kind of vicarious purchase had been better than none. And now these delights, too, were for ever over. His fountain had run dry. Sir Leopold had triumphed.

  At this moment he found himself straying into an aisled medley of empties in hide. There is nothing like leather; here there was nothing but leather, and all of it made up into articles ranging in size from trunks that would contain the remains of a Daniel Lambert to card-cases that would hold practically nothing at all. And all of a sudden Philip fancied he would like to buy a cigarette-case. He would have preferred one of enamel or gold or ivory or tortoise-shell or lizard or shagreen; or even of silver or suede. But preferences are expensive. And as he sauntered on, his dreamy eye ranging the counters in search merely of a cigarette-case he could buy, his glance alighted on a ‘gent’s dressing-case’.

  It was of pigskin, and, unlike the central figure in Rembrandt’s Lesson in Anatomy, it so lay that the whole of its interior was in full view, thus revealing a modest row of silver-topped bottles, similar receptacles for soap, tooth-brushes, pomade, and hair-restorer; a shoe-horn, a boot-hook, an ivory paper-knife, and hair-brushes, ‘all complete’. Philip mused on the object for a moment or two, perplexed by a peculiar
effervescence that was going on in his vitals. He then approached the counter and asked its price.

  ‘The price, sir?’ echoed the assistant, squinnying at the tiny oblong of pasteboard attached by a thread to the ring of the handle; ‘the price of that article is seventeen, seventeen, six.’

  He was a tubby little man with boot-button eyes, and his snort, Philip thought, was a trifle unctuous.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, putting a bold face on the matter, ‘it looks a sound vulgar workaday bag. A trifle blatant perhaps. Have you anything – less ordinary?’

  ‘Something more expensive, sir? Why, yes, indeed. This is only a stock line – the “Archdeacon” or “Country Solicitor” model. We have prices to suit all purses. Now if you were thinking of something which you might call resshersy, sir’ – and Philip now was – ‘there’s a dressing-case under the window over there was specially made to the order of Haitch Haitch the Maharaja of Jolhopolloluli. Unfortunately, sir, the gentleman deceased suddenly a week or two ago; climate, I understand. His funeral obliquies were in the newspaper, you may remember. The consequence being, his ladies not, as you might say, concurring, the dressing-case in a manner of speaking is on our hands – and at a considerable reduction. Only six hundred and seventy-five guineas, sir; or rupees to match.’

  ‘May I look at it?’ said Philip. ‘Colonel Crompton Pim.’

  ‘By all means, sir,’ cried the little man as if until that moment he had failed to notice that Philip was a long-lost son; ‘Colonel Crompton Pim; of course. Here is the article, sir, a very handsome case, and quite unique, one of the finest, in fact, I have ever had the privilege of handling since I was transferred to this Department – from the Sports, sir.’

  He pressed a tiny knob, the hinges yawned, and Philip’s mouth began to water. It was in sober sooth a handsome dressing-case, and the shaft of sunlight that slanted in on it from the dusky window seemed pleased to be exploring it. It was a dressing-case of tooled red Levant morocco, with gold locks and clasps and a lining of vermilion watered silk, gilded with a chaste design of lotus flowers, peacocks, and houris, the ‘fittings’ being of gold and tortoise-shell, and studded with so many minute brilliants and emeralds that its contents even in that rather dingy sunbeam, appeared to be delicately on fire.