Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Anyhow, no one really young and silly and gullible and romantic would have taken food on such an expedition. It was not as though the face at the window would share it. She knew perfectly well that it was for her own sustenance alone – though it had quickly ceased to be. In fact the flavour of raspberry jam even as a memory was slightly indigestible. Miss Curtis was sorry her inside could betray her like that. Sitting among the sand-dunes with the long grey-green nodding grasses, the faint winds stirring their surface under those sunny heavens, and the bright platter of the empty sea– that would only have been pleasanter and pleasanter to remember. But not so the raspberry jam!

  And now, in memory, Miss Curtis had come out of the glass and cast-iron shelter to which her feverish excitement had consigned her. It had been for only a very few minutes – to quiet down. With a glance at its one other occupant, an old gentleman, of whose countenance – since he was muffled up to the eyes in shawls – nothing was visible except spectacles, she had set out once more. It had been her new rule to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the barometer under the flagstaff on the front until she was nearly opposite the balcony, and then to cast only one firm straight intent glance up at the window, before – and this was the most horrible abyss to remember – before sitting down on a neighbouring seat, a few yards further on. Yes, she could be frank with herself about even that now. She had accustomed herself to sit down there – in wait for him. She had definitely broken herself in to that, and solely with the intention of lying in wait for him. Of lying in wait for him – like other women. Her one scrap of redeeming decency being that once she was seated she never by a fraction of an inch turned her head. Indeed sitting there – horribly stiff and hot and self-conscious – she might be out of sight of him – unless of course, he changed his position at the window to look. And wasn’t that perhaps the least one could expect – when at any rate one had oneself sunk so low? It was on this afternoon however she was to learn that it is actually possible in this world to sink as low as that, and nobody, no human being anyhow, be a penny the richer. While you yourself might remain – well, what? Indescribably poorer? Just because you have been humbled to the dust? Because you’ve been taught your lesson? Had there been need to learn that? And supposing it had not been a lesson – a holiday task?

  A slow smile had stolen into Miss Curtis’s face – not sour but extraordinarily resolute, even a little grim. But never mind all that. It was the last afternoon of her degradation she was now thinking of. Questions were useless now.

  She had found him there at his window just as usual, just as immobile, and almost excruciatingly alone, as if simply stricken with solitude. Smiling, oh yes; but – she hadn’t any doubt of it now – unhappy. It was absurd to deny it any longer. He was alone, he was desperate, he needed help. At this it seemed that an emotion of infinite understanding, of selfless abandonment, had swamped over her. She didn’t even smile back that afternoon. She only looked. But with all her self – mind, heart, and soul and all these thirty years of long waiting – welling over in her eyes. It was no good mincing matters. She had felt like that: just swamped – like some clumsily handled Sunday tripper’s rowing-boat that has landed wrong side on on the beach with a smart sea running. Every drop of blood in her body seemed at that moment to have come to a standstill. Then the gulp, the clutch at her bag, and she had sat down.

  She had sat down, her back to the high pleasant house behind her and a few paces to her left, with its late Georgian greenish balconies. And there she had simply waited on and on and on. She had to do so; there was no help for it; tomorrow – or the next day – she must be going back. She couldn’t blue all her savings, not to the very last stiver. Why then he must realize it; his very intelligence would reveal it if only she gave him time. She would wait, and he would declare himself. To ignore her now! With a face like that, a smile so unmotived, so wistful! Perfidy like that was not possible even in this perfidious world. The bottom of things didn’t come out quite like that.

  So she had sat on and on, only once drifting on, for fifty yards or so, very very slowly, her eyes on the sea, and then returning – without so much as an eyelash lifted towards the window. And as she sat down there the second time – her heart grown a little cold, her mind miserable with wrangling voices, there had presented itself in the skies opposite to her the most astonishing sunset she had ever seen.

  It appeared as if the clouds must have been waiting in the wings all day for this last huge transformation scene. They were journeying, rank on rank, each to its appointed place, not only drenching heaven and earth with an enormous pomp of colour, but widening, shallowing, patterning the whole western horizon and even the zenith arched over her simple head. It was an amazingly joyful spectacle. One could hardly believe that again and again and again throughout the centuries of the earth’s solitary and peopled existence just such vast preparations as these must often have been made before – as if for the entry of some all-powerful and all-merciful potentate. Yet one who never actually appeared. And it didn’t occur to Miss Curtis that, strictly speaking, the immense scene she was contemplating was hers alone; that every instant it was beginning a little further westward to some other spectator; indeed – sobering thought – that sunset was always going on for someone; and daybreak too, for that matter.

  For herself that evening the two extremes seemed to have combined into one. And then, night. During those last brief minutes she had realized as she watched what it is to be in the presence of a life of infinite possibilities, crammed, brimmed with joys and anguish and responsibilities and delights that no foresight could apprehend. She was to realize too at the end of those few minutes what it is – so far as she was concerned – to see it instantaneously fade away and die, while still these lovely apparitions of the heavens burned on, in their turn too to fade away. For this life of which she had caught this marvellous glimpse had itself never even been a possibility – merely an illusion. Worse, a delusion.

  Miss Curtis was not smiling now as she stood looking out into the street. Her face had never worn an expression so assured and resolute and indomitable. What a solace is a career, what a never-wearisome refuge plenty to do! How wise, how sagacious to retire and just look on. At least so it seemed now.

  At Newhampton that evening an awful moment had intervened, a moment almost appallingly ridiculous to recall. For you can’t actually remember racking pain of mind and spirit any more than you can remember bodily agony. Voices had sounded out behind her as she sat with her little bag clutched in her tailor-made lap, her whole person positively blazing with the preternatural dyes of the west. And one of those voices she was to remember – it had sounded familiar too, though she had never heard it before – to her dying day. It was the voice of the Destroyer.

  The esplanade at this moment had been all but deserted – empty. Two men – and as if a tocsin had proclaimed him, she knew who one of them was – two men had come straight across from the house behind her, had passed the seat on her left about twenty yards away, had then turned right, and now were but a pace or two distant. She positively saw all this, as if she had eyes between her shoulder-blades. And she had sat on, motionless, half-suffocated with suspense, unable for an instant to stir hand or foot.

  Then, with that vast western light for help, she had looked up – straight into the unknown one’s face, straight into his eyes. And though they were fixed in her direction they had made no sign. None – just none. How could they? For though they were wide open they were veiled by a peculiar film, and even if the unknown one’s hand had not been resting on his companion’s arm, she would have realized at once that he was blind.

  It was curious, perhaps, that being so, he could be capable – as that curiously vague gentle smile seemed to testify – of enjoying this spectacle of light and colour and refulgence, of sea, air, and sky. But Miss Curtis had never thought it curious. She had first heard only the voice, without catching the words, and then had gulped down the heart that had come into her mouth,
and had so clumsily clutched at the wrong end of her bag, that her thermos flask had slipped out of it, had rolled with extraordinary animation out of her lap and fallen with an incredible crash on to the asphalt beneath.

  ‘What’s that, what’s that?’ the voice had cried out, and a panic-stricken expression had transfigured the mute pale face.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the other replied. ‘It’s only a lady who has dropped something.’ And then as if in confidence: ‘As a matter of fact, a bottle of tea, poor thing.’

  The last words had been scarcely more than muttered. But in moments of extreme torture the senses may be exceedingly acute and the whole soul observant. They had remained fixed in Miss Curtis’s mind as finally as if they had been recorded in wax for the gramophone. ‘A bottle of tea.’ But since something that seemed very much like her whole being, her very heart itself had at this moment been shattered into bits, it wasn’t till some little time after, when the deeper wounds were numbing, that she felt the full destructiveness of that ‘poor thing’. To see ourselves as others see us and not through the distortion of self-deception, rapture, and romance – ‘Poor thing!’ – in the very words with which she herself had sometimes compassionated in silence some blowsy bedraggled tripper – or worse! ‘And so ad infinitum.’ That, anyhow, only amused her now.

  And that had been the end of it. Miss Curtis had stooped – the blood rushing to her head and staining her vision as she did so – and had picked up her broken flask. It looked a little disgusting but she had stuffed it back into her bag with her raspberry-jam sandwiches and her bun. Then she had swept her hands down over her lap almost as if she had finished a most delicious meal and wanted to get rid of the crumbs. And then she had got up and gone off on her picnic to the sand-dunes. And then …

  But now Miss Mavor, having finished her last few little jobs – and all lip-sticked and freshly powdered for the evening – was ready to go. Miss Curtis herself pulled down the last dark-blue blind, the blind that covered the glass of the door. And she herself turned the handle and opened that door.

  ‘Good-night, Miss Curtis,’ said Miss Mavor.

  ‘Good-night,’ said Miss Curtis; then turned back into the vacant and half-lighted shop to get her own neat hand-bag and admirable umbrella, and to put on her hat and coat.

  * As printed in BS (1942). First published in Criterion and Virginia Quarterly Review, April 1930.

  An Ideal Craftsman*

  Away into secrecy frisked a pampered mouse. A scuffling of bedclothes, the squeak of a dry castor followed, and then suddenly the boy sat up and set to piecing together reality with scraps of terrifying but half-forgotten dreams.

  It was his ears had summoned him; they were still ringing with an obscure message, a faint Qui vive? But as he sat blinking and listening in the empty dark he could not satisfy himself what sound it was that had actually wakened him. Was it only a dying howl from out of one of his usual nightmares, or had some actual noise or cry sounded up from the vacancy of the house beneath? It was this uncertainty – as if his brain were a piece of mechanism wound up by sleep – that set working a vivid panorama of memories in the little theatre of his mind – cloaked men huddled together in some dark corner of the night, scoundrels plotting in the wind, the pause between rifle-click and the loose fall, finally to culminate in the adventure of glorious memory – raiding Jacobs.

  He groped under his pillow for the treasures he had concealed there before blowing out his candle – a box of matches, a crumbling slice of pie-crust, and a dingy volume of the Newgate Calendar. The last usually lay behind the draughty chimney of his fireplace, because Jacobs had the habits of a ferret and nothing was safe from his nosings. He struck a match soundlessly on the edge of his mattress. Its flare lit up his lank-haired head, his sharp face and dazzled eyes. Then the flame drooped, went out. But he had had time to find the broad glossy belt he had cut out of a strip of mottled American cloth and the old sheathed poniard which he had months ago abstracted from his father’s study. He buckled on the belt round his body in the dark over his night-shirt and dangled the rusty blood- (or water-) stained poniard coldly on his hip. He pulled on his stockings, tilted an old yachting cap over his eyes, and was fully equipped.

  In this feverish haste he had had little time to ponder strategy. But now he sat down again on the edge of his bed, and though he was pretending to think, his brows wrinkled in a frown, he was actually listening. Even the stairs had ceased to creak. And the star that from a wraith of cloud glittered coldly in the night-sky beyond the rift between his curtains made no sound. He drew open his door, inch by inch, still intent, then stepped out on to the landing.

  The first danger to be encountered on the staircase below was his father’s bedroom. Its door gaped half-open, but was it empty? It was here on this very spot, he remembered with a qualm, that Jacobs had once leapt out on him. He saw in memory that agile shape stepping hastily and oddly in the dusk, furious at sight of the eavesdropper. And in an instant the tiny blue bead of gas on the landing had expanded into a white fan-shaped glare. Not so tonight. With a gasp and an oblique glance at the dusky bed and the spectral pendent clothes within, he slid by in safety on his stockinged feet, and so past yet another door – but this one tight shut, with its flower-painted panels – the door of his mother’s gay little sitting-room, his real mother’s, not the powdery eyebrowed stepmother who a few hours before had set out with his father, on pleasure bent.

  A few paces beyond he trod even more cautiously, for here was a loose board. At the last loop of the staircase Jacobs’s customary humming should issue up out of the gloom beneath – the faint tune which he rasped on and on and on, faint and shrill between his teeth, superciliously, ironically, in greasy good-humour or sly facetiousness – he would hum it in his coffin perhaps. But no, not a sound. The raider hesitated. What next? Where now? He listened in vain.

  And then, he suddenly remembered that this was ‘silver’ night. And doubtless – cook and housemaid long since snoring in their attic – a white glittering array of forks and spoons, soup ladles, and candlesticks were at this very moment spread out in bedaubed splendour before the aproned tyrant. For Jacobs was not only queer in his habits and nocturnal by nature but a glutton for work. But if it was silver night, why this prodigious hush? No clang of fork ringing against its neighbour; not a single rattle of whitening brush on metal reached his ears.

  Slim as a ferret himself, he hung over the loop in the staircase as he might have hung over the Valley of Death; but still all was strangely quiet. And so, with a pang of disappointment, and at the same moment with a crow of relief, the boy came to the conclusion that Jacobs was out. And not for the first time either. He must have had a visitor – the woman in the black bonnet, with the silver locket dangling on her front, perhaps. As likely as not, they had gone off gallivanting together, and would re-appear about eleven o’clock, Jacobs either swearing and quarrelsome or amiably garrulous.

  But the boy was no fool. In spite of this sinister hush in the house – as if its walls were draped with the very darkness of night – Jacobs might perhaps be busy over his silver. Shammy, however hard you rub with it, makes little sound. And if he were, then too much confidence would mean not only a sudden pursuit, a heart-daunting scuttle up the stairs, and Jacobs with his cane cutting at his legs from behind, but the failure of his raid altogether. Nothing then but a bit of stale pie-crust for his midnight feast. So he trod on velvet down the stairs, his damp palm shunning the banister (that squeak would wake an army!), his lips dry and his tongue rolling in luxury of anticipation. And soon he was in the hall, with all the empty rooms of the house above his head, and minified in his own imagination to a mere atom of whiteness in the dusk, a mouse within smell of the cat. His rusty poniard clutched tight between his fingers, his stomach full of fear and his heart noisy as a cock-crow, he pushed on.

  The staircase ran widely and shallowly into the hall; there was more light here, a thin faint glow of gas-light, turned low. He co
uld distinguish the dark shapes of the heavy furniture, as he stalked on through this luminous twilight. But the back passage to the kitchen quarters was hidden from elegant visitors by a muffled door with a spring, which Jacobs, when it suited him, kept propped wide open. This passage, if followed to the end, turned abruptly at right angles; and at the inner angle near the fusty entry to the cellars he paused to breathe and then to listen again. Once round the corner, along the passage in front of him the kitchen door would come into view, ajar or wide open, on the right; and the larder itself a few paces further on, and exactly opposite the raider. But before reaching it, the boot cupboard, sour den of long-legged spiders and worse abominations, must be passed, and the window with the panes of coloured glass, looking out on a monstrous red, yellow, or blue garden of trees and stars.

  The boy’s lean dark face had in his progress become paler and leaner. His legs were now the skinny playthings of autumnal draughts, and at this moment a sound had actually reached his ears – the sound as of a lion panting over a meal. A sort of persistent half-choked snuffling. This was odd. This was surprising. Even when, with sleeves turned up and sharp elbows bared, Jacobs was engrossed in any job, he never breathed like that. In general, indeed, he scarcely seemed to be breathing at all; when for example, he stooped down close handing a dish of cabbage or blanc-mange at the Sunday dinner table of a taciturn father. This breathing was husky and unequal, almost like a snore through nostrils and mouth. Jacobs must be drunk, then; and that would mean either a sort of morose good-humour, or a sullen drowsy malice, as dangerous as it was sly. The adventure was losing its edge. Even the hunger for romance in the boy’s Scots-French blood died down within him at recollection of the dull, dull-lidded eyes of Jacobs half drunk.