Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Then, again, he heartily agreed with the lecturer that the piece To Helen was a remarkable feat for a lad in his early teens – most remarkable. But he deplored any suggestion that all lads of fourteen should be encouraged to be equally precocious. There were dangers. Even, too, though a man may be his own worst enemy, he may yet attain renown as a writer. Poe himself had. Nevertheless he implored them one and all to remember that it is better by far for ever to hold one’s peace than to write, however attractively, what it may some day be too late to recall. That solemn thought, he gathered, was their lecturer’s urgent lesson to them this evening.

  Before, he concluded, before inviting that stronghold of their society, Miss Alibone, to propose a vote of thanks to Professor Monk, he would like to announce that at their next meeting their old friend Mr Alfred Okes, so busy in so many fields, was to talk to them on the subject of conchology – the science of sea-shells, from the whelk to the conch – the latter being famous in mythology, though it was frequently mispronounced. And on that occasion there would be lantern slides.

  ‘I ask you, sir’ – he suddenly rounded on the professor with the most tactful and endearing of smiles – ‘I ask you, sir, to accept our heartiest, our most cordial thanks for your most entertaining, informative, and, I will add, even edifying discourse. We have been well fed.’

  The professor unsealed his tired eyes, looked up, smiled a little wanly, and hastily pocketed his paper. In a few minutes, the hall already nearly empty, he had followed his chairman down the five well-worn, red-druggeted steps into the ante-chamber. There he was welcomed by a row of empty wooden chairs, a solid grained table, a copper-plate engraving in a large black frame over the chimneypiece of a gentleman in side-whiskers, whose name, owing to the foxed condition of the print, he had been unable to decipher, and the ashes of a fire in the grate. It had been feebly alight when he arrived. It was now dead out. Why did this seemingly harmless chamber at this moment resemble the scene of a nightmare? He could not tell. His chairman seemed to be finding nothing amiss with it. He was adjusting his grey woollen muffler, he had bidden him a hearty good-night, he had turned away, adding jovially over his shoulder, as he hurried forth: ‘Ah, Professor Monk, here’s a little friend to see you – eager no doubt to drink at the fountain-head. Come in, my dear’ – and was gone.

  The little friend, however, who was now beaming at the professor from under a dark felt, medallioned school-hat and from behind gold spectacles straddling a small, blunt, resolute nose, was in fact anxious only to secure his autograph and still more anxious to discover if he could possibly be related to Miss Mima Monk, the famous film star. ‘It’s the same name, you see,’ she said, ‘that’s why.’

  Alas! the professor was compelled to confess, he had no relatives in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He opened the little green and gold birthday book, and turned a little wearily to November 8, to read: ‘Words are the only things that last for ever. – William Hazlitt.’ The child watched him as he made the dot after his sedate signature a little more emphatic.

  ‘We’ve learned some of Mr Poe’s poems in class,’ she was assuring him breathlessly. ‘I think it’s lovely. Our teacher says The Bells is meant to sound like real bells – it’s all imitation.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ the professor replied, ‘it is called onomatopoeia.’

  ‘Omonatopoe-oe-oeia,’ she trebled after him like a wren, and with yet another coy and beaming smile had taken her book and departed.

  Her footsteps, it seemed, had suddenly quickened into a scamper, then she too was gone. The professor sighed, and rose from his chair. And then, suddenly transfixed, with one arm actually halfway through the sleeve of his antiquated mackintosh, he turned, realizing that what he had vaguely foreseen and apprehended had come to pass.

  The gentleman in the black cloak until this moment unperceived in the shadow at the turn of the door had advanced into the room, and was now confronting him from the other end of the varnished table. The glass-shaded electric lamp that hung between them shed a lustre almost as of alabaster on his pallid face and wide prominent forehead – a pallor intensified by the darkness of his long hair, the marked eyebrows, the small moustache. He was a man seemingly aged about forty, rather under the middle height, and spare, but he carried himself with an air of elegance, a trace even of the foppish. His black beaver hat clasped between his delicate hands, he remained silent and motionless, his chin, the least vigorous of his finely cut features, lowered upon his black satin stock, his dark luminous grey eyes fixed on the professor’s face. There was a peculiar abstraction, even vacancy in their depths – a slightly catlike appearance, as if they were not wholly in focus; and this, in spite of the intense regard in them – a regard which brought to the professor’s mind a phrase he had read somewhere – ‘they seemed to shed darkness in that place’. And though they expressed no hostility, and Professor Monk had the advantage in stature, he was finding it difficult to meet them. They were strangely occupied eyes. Besides, the hall outside was now not only silent but empty; and it was atrociously cold.

  The imp within his mind had begun chattering again. ‘He stoppeth one of three’, was echoing in the professor’s consciousness. Why The Ancient Mariner? The cold, perhaps. Meanwhile, he realized that he must break this ice. His silence was becoming discourteous. He glanced again at his visitor, and was again sharply reminded that he bore a striking resemblance … To what? To whom? There had been no pause in which to collect his thoughts. The professor met many strangers; how could he be expected with all the good will in the world to recall always either themselves or their names? Names are at best but labels.

  ‘Er – good evening —’ he began – but a low, insistent voice had broken in on him.

  ‘Where is this place?’ it was inquiring.

  ‘This place? Where?’ exclaimed the professor. ‘Wigston, you mean?’

  ‘Wigston – ah, yes. And England?’

  The professor continued to listen, the prey now of another kind of discomfort. There are degrees of eccentricity – and he was alone.

  ‘That was my impression,’ the other was saying. ‘And these people’ – he raised his hat in a peculiarly graceful gesture towards the doorway – ‘these people were not completely ignorant of the subject of your address?’

  ‘Indeed, no’; a deprecating smile had crept into the professor’s face; ‘though we mustn’t of course expect —.’ But he was not allowed to complete his sentence.

  ‘And you yourself must have been deeply interested in your theme to venture on compounding a complete lecture upon it. Fifty-three minutes in all!’

  ‘Indeed, yes,’ interjected the professor warmly.

  ‘I see.’ The stranger paused. ‘I observed that the date on the notice-board facing the street is 2nd November, and the year 1932. You will realize that I have myself come some little distance. There are – difficulties. But it was rather the name than the date which attracted me. Edgar Allan Poe’s, I mean, and your own, too, of course. I fear I cannot compliment you upon its appearance.’

  ‘My name! … Oh, yes, the street?’ said the professor.

  ‘Rain so sooty-dark upon a scene so dismal, the niggardly glare, the stench, and what might be described as the realism of it all! You yourself perhaps are unfamiliar with Virginia – Richmond, Charlottesville, the South. You are from Oxford, perhaps? Has that ancient seat of learning also endured of late the ravages of change?’

  The slim erect figure had bowed slightly – with a deprecating politeness. The professor shook his head. ‘No, not Oxford; London,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, yes, London. I am from …’ But at this moment, unfortunately, the neighbouring foundry had once more metallically ejected its slag, and the word was lost. ‘So Edgar Allan Poe’ – his visitor pronounced the syllables as if they were in the nature of a sarcasm or even a jest – ‘so Edgar Allan Poe is remembered even in this benighted town?’

  ‘Remembered!’ cried the professor. ‘Why, yes, indeed. My whole i
ntention was to suggest for what reason he should be remembered. The acoustics of the hall, perhaps —’

  ‘But, indeed,’ the stranger was assuring him, ‘I heard perfectly. I was engrossed. Engrossed. A host of remote memories, echoes, speculations returned into my mind. But I have ventured to intrude on you, not to pay compliments which you might find wearisome, but in the hope that you will allow me – even at this late day and hour – to ask you one or two questions.’

  The professor’s dark eyebrows expressed a faint surprise. ‘As a matter of fact —’ he began.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the visitor hastened to add, ‘I was aware that your chairman had invited questions – with a disarming cordiality indeed. But though, professor, you had remarkably attentive listeners, you will agree perhaps that they were rather passively receptive than actively critical. That was my impression. There is an old saying: Every time a sheep bleats it loses a mouthful. Well, yours at least never bleated. Apart from that, however, there are questions it may be more courteous to ask in private. Such as mine. May I continue?’

  ‘By all means.’ The professor’s eye ranged furtively over the intensely unoccupied row of hard-wood chairs. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the stranger; ‘when I disagree I prefer to stand. I have come, as you see, unarmed, except in respect of the tongue. We are on equal terms, then, though you might perhaps agree that in matters of the mind one solitary question may be almost mortal in effect. First, then, am I justified in deducing from what you have said that one word would summarize your own personal attitude towards the man of letters you have lately been dissecting: the word “scorn”? You were at pains, I admit, to disguise it, to salve in one sentence the wound given by another. But the tone, the flavour, the accent – I could not be mistaken. And is not scorn, professor, a dubious incitement for the critic, the expounder, the appreciator of any artist and his work? Moreover, it is one thing to despise a fellow-creature, another to malign him.’

  ‘Malign!’ cried the professor. ‘My sole aim and intention was to tell the truth.’

  ‘Ay, and so you dragged the well. And I am now enjoying the flavour of its dregs. You had ninety-eight listeners this evening. I myself counted them. You gave me plenty of time – between your ideas, I mean. That was fortunate. Your poet, let me inform you, once read his Eureka – an essay in the imaginative synthesis of philosophical and scientific thought which you evaded so skilfully by the mere mention of it – he read, I say, his Eureka – his mistress jewel – on a stormy night in a bitterly cold hall in Richmond before an audience of only sixty souls in all. It occupied two hours and a half. You and your hungry little flock, then, had not only the easier ordeal, but also a less difficult subject-matter. Apart from the title of your paper, you divided it into four parts: The Environment; the Man; the Tales and Poems; the Aftermath. Am I right? Superficially, that is a simple and lucid arrangement. Did you keep to it? Hardly. Again and again, like the moth to the candle – or shall we say, to the star! – you returned to the poet’s private life, to his unhappy childhood, aureoled, in your own pinchbeck phrase, “with the chameleonic hues of romance”. To the follies and misfortunes of his youth, to his failures, his poverty, his bereavements, his afflictions of body and mind, and what you supposed to be his soul – to his miserable death. Well, we live and die, and must leave posterity to do its best – and its worst – with us. But was it necessary to regale your docile and ignorant audience with allusions to the poet’s young mother, the forsaken, penniless actress, and to her vile, tragic death in a filthy tenement when he himself was a child? I grant you his Helen. She even reminded your quick wits of Troy. But what of his simple-minded and afflicted sister Eulalie? What of exhuming into the light of night the very remains of his ever-youthful and long-suffering Virginia – to pry and peer into their sacred secrets? You used the word morbid. Whose was the morbid, yes, and the sordid, when you declared that those poor relics had actually lain concealed awhile under the bed of one of her husband’s besotted biographers? The ashes of Annabel Lee, forsooth! And selfless and faithful old Mrs Clemm, her mother, his more-than-mother, with her basket of broken meats collected from door to door to save her loved ones from starvation. And the poet’s cloak, that in those icy winters in New York had to serve by day as a protection for his own wretched back, and by night as a coverlet for his dying Virginia’s bed. You used the term, tragedy, professor; why did you turn it into a melodrama? Is there to be no humanity or decent reticence concerning the life of a man who is dead, mainly because he was a writer? Is every poet at the hands of any showman doomed to suffer again and again the pangs of a Monsieur Waldemar? I ask you – I put the question.’

  ‘Let me repeat,’ said the professor frigidly, ‘you have misjudged my intention. You imply that a man’s circumstances in life have no relation to his actions, to his principles, to his ideals. I deny it. Knowledge aids understanding. How else explain, excuse, condone?’

  ‘Condone! It was, then, with the same compassionate aim that, having condensed a lifetime of forty years – not an exorbitant allowance – into a sensational and appetizing quarter of an hour, you dealt with the man? It was perhaps your passion for moderation that persuaded you only to hint at such words as mountebank, ingrate, wastrel, fortune-hunter, seducer, debauchee, dipsomaniac. Hints serve better. But words, professor, have the strange power of revealing not merely what a man consciously intends to say, but what, perhaps unknown to himself, he means and feels. And the simplest of your listeners can have been in little doubt of that. I confess to perplexity. Have the poets themselves ever claimed to be saints? Have the most exemplary of them ever professed to be anything but sinners? Name me one poet, one imaginative writer even, of any account, whom you yourself suspect of believing that his failings as a man in any sense or degree aided his genius. They may profess it – but not within themselves! Oh, yes, I agree that a man’s writings indelibly reflect him and all of him that matters most. And since your poet’s are all that is left of him in this world, and they alone are of lasting value, should we not look for him there? Did you attempt to depict, to describe, to illuminate that reflection? No: for that would have needed insight, the power to divine, to re-create. You are a stern and ardent moralist, professor. But since when has the platform become a pulpit? It needs, too, little courage to attack and stigmatize the dead.’

  The stranger’s wandering gaze had returned slowly to the professor’s face. ‘Provided, of course, you are confident that dead he will remain. Nonetheless it seems to me a rather paltry amusement – carrion stuff.’

  ‘I say again,’ cried Professor Monk hotly, ‘truth was my aim. I resent this attack. It is beside the point.’

  ‘For my part,’ said the other, ‘I resent nothing. I am here merely to “drink from the fountain-head”. But even if we admit that from his childhood up, as a human being, gentleman, and Christian, your poet fell far short even of the happy mean, is there no other standard by which to judge him? The decalogue he shared with every man, and, like most men, and many professors, he would long since have been forgotten if he had not proved himself – I will not venture to say worthy of remembrance, but – defiant of oblivion. What he might have done even in spite of his miseries and weaknesses, his tortured nerves and treacherous body – that no man can declare. But in respect, professor, to what he actually did – as an artist, a man of letters, a poet? Does that suggest that he ever consented to sell the smallest fraction of his soul for bread, or wine, or – brief anodyne against a world which he himself had no hand in creating – even drugs? Did he condescend to write down to his readers; or, worse, up? Did he betray his intelligence; prostitute his mind; parade his heart? Did he even attempt to improve the shining hour? You would agree that the writer in his solitude must obey scruples, hold fast to an aesthetic probity, serve with a forlorn devotion in a cause which the generality of men know nothing of. But his laws are unwritten laws. Not that I suggest that your victim even in this was blameless �
� far from it. But you yourself seem never to have been aware of such an ordeal. You made pretty play with the artistic temperament – with your morbid, and your moody, and your melancholy, and your misanthrope – but of the artist’s conscience not one word.’

  ‘Even if your allegations were not grossly exaggerated,’ said the professor, ‘surely there is little novelty in such a notion, and I had to consider my listeners.’

  ‘Had the poets,’ said the other, ‘put their faith solely in novelty and considered only their listeners, there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Hamlet, and a few of the Greek tragedies. Surely only an artist’s best is worth his trouble? And that being so – Heaven help him – can he, need he care who shares it? Let me repeat, I am not defending Mr Poe, God forbid; he is gone long since, as your genial friend the minister on the platform would put it, to his account. It could be only then in the strangeness of some sepulchral dream that he could or would return to a world he little liked, and was little liked by. But all this apart – these dingy relics, I mean, the unsavoury events of his life and the invaluable lessons to be derived from them: what conceivable concern had they with the very subject of your paper?’

  The slate-grey eyes peered out dark with anger from behind the glass of their spectacles. ‘Subject?’