Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Well, there may well have been a streak of the troubadour in his hereditary make-up; it accounted, perhaps, for the fact that his ‘purple patches’ were occasionally of a purple a little loud. As the wheels of his carriage began more rapidly to revolve again, he stood up at the window, smiled charmingly at both parties, and – raised his hat.

  Decisions are always reviving. Refreshed after his nap, alert and alone, he returned to his corner. And there, amid the rattle of glass and wood and metal – the long-shadowed September sunshine beyond his window, rusty gold on sheaf and stack and thatch and pensive beechwood – he burst out laughing. Never for a moment had he dreamed that the mere circulation of his Parleyings could require such critical skill. He was three up, one to play, and (he glanced at his watch) there was still thirty minutes to go. Why, he could probably have disposed of the complete edition on a five-shilling fare in two days’ railway travelling. Much would depend on what happened to his ‘fourth’. At which, as if he had positively beckoned it with his finger, the name-board of the station he had but a moment before left behind him, flashed back into his consciousness. His own was three behind it! He had overslept.

  By nature impulsive, Hilbert at once seized his bag, tugged at the brim of his hat, and prepared to alight; and then, seeing that the train was bumping along at not much less than twenty miles an hour, he sat down again. When he did get out – a few minutes afterwards – the only human being in sight (after he had explained his sad case to the ticket collector) was a curate – a strapping young man, with lips like a cherry, and the assured air of a juvenile archdeacon. How odd; two of a cloth, if not of a kidney, in less than an hour! Still, if the Church went on like this all would be well.

  The cherry effect – Hilbert felt assured, as he stalked his latest prey up the wooden steps and over the bridge – was only skin deep. The young man walked with decision, and so held his head as if he were dead certain it was brimmed with brains of an inestimable value. But yet it was a head that looked a little unpromising – for Hilbert’s purposes. A trace of the Byronic, perhaps, but none of the Wordsworthian. Its mere shape and carriage suggested that it was seldom closely connected with its companion piece, the heart. Its owner might no doubt be bound for a New Jerusalem, but what little Hilbert detected of it hadn’t the least resemblance to Blake’s.

  Hilbert began to fear it might be as easy to extract plums from plain duff as what he wanted from this athletic young ecclesiastic. Still, dum spiro spero, though he must waste not a moment.

  The curate had seated himself, and from a side-pocket had extracted a copy of a bluish-covered magazine. Hilbert passed him by, paused, wheeled, coughed.

  ‘I’m so sorry; but I have been taken on,’ he said, ‘by mistake. I went to sleep, in fact. This is the platform for Dunmow Downs, isn’t it?’

  The young man in holy orders looked up. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I am expecting – er – a friend by the next one in, and my own station is the one before it. Bad luck.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Hilbert, continuing to smile because he was listening so hard. ‘It’s this drowsy autumn weather.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the young stranger, whose jacket and trousers and nattily tailored ‘vest’ were all of pepper and salt, and who, from dog-collar to black brogue shoes, was as neat as a new altar vase, ‘it is a bit close. Thunder, perhaps. I always wake myself by knocking my skull on the window frame once for each station I have to go. It’s infallible. But then, when I go to sleep I always intend to; and I never dream.’

  ‘Gracious heavens!’ groaned Hilbert inwardly. He surveyed the choice shaven face with ill-concealed consternation. He must try another tack. ‘One misses so much, too,’ he went on seductively, ‘even if one does. Dream, I mean. That lovely bit of landscape, you remember, with the peewits and the old mill, between here and Bewley Marshes. And especially’ – he stooped forward a little – ‘especially when it is getting towards evening, and the sun is low.’ The very cadence of the words was an anodyne and a spell.

  At this the young man eyed Hilbert steadily, and eyed him whole. Then he slowly refolded his magazine, replaced it in his pocket, and said: ‘Yes. I suppose nice scenery is a pleasant adjunct to railway travelling – but I haven’t much time for it myself.’

  ‘No,’ breathed Hilbert, and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘a great adjunct. And now the swallows will soon be flown.’

  ‘Odd beggars, aren’t they?’ remarked the curate. ‘All that irrational journey just to come back! Purely mechanistic, you know; it’s merely the light that does it; not even the weather. Only the other day I happened to pick up a scientific periodical, or rather a quasi-scientific periodical – The Aviarian, you know – and some old Lincolnshire windbag was saying …’

  The ensuing soliloquy, which ranged from natural or quasi-natural history to – in Hilbert’s modest opinion – completely unnatural socialism, lasted exactly five and a half minutes. And the moment his new acquaintance had warmed up, he needed no stoking.

  Quite the reverse, for when in desperation Hilbert had managed to inter-ejaculate: ‘But I do sometimes feel, you know, that being absolutely broke and not on the dole merely because one is not a sweep or a stoker or a bricklayer, and being so vilely harassed and harried that one becomes half daft and physically sick with —’

  ‘Speaking for myself,’ shouted the curate, ‘there is absolutely no silly trouble or ailment of body or mind – or heart, ha, ha, either – that cannot be cured by a cold bath.’

  ‘Yes; and even life itself,’ Hilbert had faintly murmured. To which, with an inhalation that seemed to have exhausted the air for yards around them, his companion had retaliated with: ‘Life, you say! Why, as for life …’ and on he went.

  It was soon as much as Hilbert could do to refrain from listening. If the sea – sad prospect – consisted solely of sand, then this electric young cleric – at least on his favourite topics – talked like a spring tide.

  But it is not, Hilbert was dolefully reflecting, from sand of this nature that Poesy’s buds of Sharon raise their gentle heads. He had had too much luck at the word ‘Go!’; and now wind and weather were failing him. His little bag was three copies lighter, but by yet another not quite light enough; and how much heavier was his heart!

  Four minutes before his self-allotted time was up a train rolled into the station. And yet – such are the oddities of human destiny – until its guard’s van with screeching brakes jangled into view, Hilbert hadn’t the faintest notion that it was bringing with it the strangest and blessedest fraction of his future life on earth. Its last but one grained-box compartment proved to contain the ‘er – a friend’ to whom it seemed, centuries ago, the curate had airily referred. And at one glance at its only occupant he was lost. Everything in the world, in Time and in Eternity, if not perhaps forgiven, was utterly forgotten.

  She was standing at the open window, looking out, but not as if she had ever entirely desisted from looking in – an oval face with highish cheekbones, and eyes and mouth from which a remote smile was now vanishing as softly and secretly as a bird enters and vanishes into its nest. A moment of dazzling vertigo had swept over Hilbert’s being. That mystery of age-long severance and incredible reunion and recognition! Where … when … had they met before? Only Heaven could have told him, and he had no need to know. In a flash of acute foreboding he had instantly scanned the eight ungloved fingers that clasped the window sash. That once almost meaningless ‘er – a friend’ had suddenly echoed in his heart like a knell. But no; every one of the eight was ringless – every single one. He turned his head away, as if momentarily exhausted yet unspeakably revived.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Sis!’ the curate had now breezily announced, ‘and only twelve and a half minutes late! … What was that about Karl Marx I was saying just now before I was interrupted …?’ His voice, like that of a Bull of Bashan haranguing his subservient heifers, had come booming again over his shoulder towards Hilbert – and Hilbert, as meekly as a dove, had
followed him in.

  Seated opposite brother and sister, almost forgetting to breathe, and in a panic of spirit that was past all mundane concerns, he forgot who he was, where he was, what: his bet, Messrs A and B, his Jesuit, Aggie, and even his little bag and the Muses. His one and only wish in this strange world was that the peculiarly disguised young Good Samaritan in the opposite corner should continue his discourse – his dessication and disposal of Syndicalism, the National Recovery Act, Major Douglas, dictatorships, Nazism, Aryan ism, and every other ism – just ad infinitum. When he stopped, the train would have stopped and – well, she would be gone. Meanwhile, to that vibrant, lusty ‘Oxford’ voice, an occasional faint ‘Yes’, or a much fainter ‘No’, was proving no more of an obstruction than a pebble is to a cataract.

  What she was thinking of, or rather, not thinking of, Hilbert hadn’t the faintest notion. And yet, such is the inflammability of the imagination, but one single glance into this fair serious face had sufficed him for the vernal stirrings of a latter-day Paradiso (and that in terza rima) to which even the long and hairy ear of Fleet Street would be compelled to incline. But now, alas! as he had forlornly foreseen, since the train had stopped, the voice had stopped, and so had his own semi-conscious ‘cerebration’.

  ‘Well, Miss Mute, and what do you say?’ The young curate had bawled his second mocking challenge at his Griselda-like sister as if it were a bone to a dog. And she, as if to be serious was a refuge for everything worth having in a world so noisy and exclamatory and absurd, turned not to her brother, but to Hilbert. She sat there, quite still, for a full moment, one hand resting lightly on either side of her lap, and then, smiled. A volley of the quasi-archest and hollowest ecclesiastical laughter followed.

  ‘Oh, she! – she never says anything!’ the young man had assured his fellow-traveller, and – with a breezy ‘Good day to you!’ – he was gone.

  Left alone for the fourth time since, hot and panting, he had galloped up into Bovey Fausset station, Hilbert drew his brown bag a little closer. It contained at this moment, apart from his Wilcox and his other shocker, that one forlorn copy of his Parleyings. And this now would never, never, never leave his possession. He might perhaps get another copy exquisitely bound in green tooled lambskin, its margins edged with a tiny design of doves and daisies, just in the remote hope that destiny would give him one more chance. But that copy would have nothing whatever to do with his bet, which by a niggardly twenty-five per cent had now, it seemed, been irretrievably lost.

  For now not only was his time up, but, since he had to be honest with himself, if only for his old Jesuit’s sake, the terms and conditions of his wager had been poetry ‘audibly proved’. And she – she had said nothing, not a word. And of course, strictly speaking, Thomas Gray’s ‘mute … Milton’ was a contradiction in terms. Hilbert could quite easily have explained all this to her – if only she had been there to explain it to! Meanwhile he had realized also that there is a goddess whose name is Silence, and that it is in her light and loveliness that the buds of Sharon break into bloom.

  ‘You see,’ he was patiently explaining to himself, as he pulled the bell in the old eighteenth-century porch of his mother’s house, for he had forgotten his latch-key, ‘you see what is called poetry is merely a trying to put into words what can, of course, never, never be really said.’

  A tiny barking like the remote jangling of Chinese temple bells had greeted him from afar; and a voice no less silvery had thereupon expostulated: ‘Silence, Pym! You naughty, foolish Pym, don’t you know who that is! And now go and tell the poet that he is exactly forty minutes late for tea, bad boy!’ But Hilbert was too deep in thought to have heeded this familiar greeting. He had gently closed the door. ‘Never,’ he added sotto voce, as he hung up his hat. ‘Never, I am afraid.’

  * As printed in SEP (1938). First published as ‘Parleyings’ in Yale Review, December 1933.

  The Trumpet*

  ‘For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel …’

  ‘And he said … Am I my brother’s keeper?’

  The minute church, obscurely lit by a full moon that had not yet found window-glass through which her direct beams could pierce into its gloaming, was deserted and silent. Not a sound, within or without, disturbed its stony quiet – except only the insect-like rapid ticking of a clock in the vestry, and the low pulsating thump of a revolving cogwheel in the tower above the roof. Here and there a polished stone gleamed coldly in the vague luminous haze – a marble head, a wing-tip, a pointing finger, the claws and beak of the eagle on the brazen lectern, the two silvergilt candlesticks flanking the colourless waxen flowers upon the altar. So secret and secluded seemed the church within its nocturnal walls that living creature might never have been here at all – or creatures only so insignificant and transitory as to have left no perceptible trace behind them.

  Like a cataleptic’s countenance it hinted moreover at no inward activity of its own. And yet, if – fantastic notion – some unseen watcher through the bygone centuries had kept it perpetually within gaze, he might at last have concluded that it possessed a sort of stagnant life or animation, at least in its passive obedience to the influences of time, change, decay, and the laws of gravitation. Now it revealed not the faintest symptom of it. If, on the other hand, any immaterial sentinel were still, as ever, on guard within it, he made no sign of his presence here.

  Unhasteningly, like water dripping from a fateful urn, the thump-recorded moments ebbed away; and it was approaching midnight and first cockcrow when from beyond the thick stone chancel walls there came the sound of a stealthy footfall, crunching the rain-soaked gravel. An owl squawked, the footsteps ceased; and after a brief pause, began again. The groping rattle of a key in the wards of a lock followed, and presently – with a motion so slow that it was barely perceptible – the heavy curtain that hung over the entrance to the vestry began as if with an extreme caution to be drawn aside; and the slender cone-shaped rays from the thick glass of a small bull’s-eye lantern – its radiance thinning into the dusk of the moonlight as it expanded in area – to funnel inquisitively to and fro.

  The lantern-bearer himself now appeared – a small boy. His thick fair hair was tousled over a pale forehead, his mouth was ajar and his lips were drawn back a little above his teeth, his eyes gleamed as they moved. The collar of his dark great-coat had been turned up about his ears, but nevertheless disclosed in the crevice between its lapels the stripes of his pyjama’s jacket which had been tucked into a pair of old flannel breeches. Stockinged ankles and damp mud-stained rubber shoes showed beneath the great-coat. His cheeks at this moment were so pale as scarcely to be tinged with red, and since the pupils of his blue eyes were dilated to their full extent they appeared to be all but jet-black. He was shivering, in part by reason of the cold, in part because of certain inward qualms and forebodings. Only by an effort was he preventing his teeth from beginning to chatter. Still acutely cautious and intent, his head thrust forward, his eyes searching the darker recesses of the building around him as they followed the direction of his tiny searchlight, he stole a pace or two forward, the border of the heavy curtain furtively swinging-to behind him. In spite of the door-key safe in his pocket, he appeared to be divided in mind between hope and dread that he might prove to be not the sole occupant of the church.

  Where there is space enough for the human cranium to pass, the shoulders, it is said, can follow; and particularly if they all three belong to a child. One small diamond-paned window in the vestry he had already observed was open. Images, too, less substantial in appearance than those of human beings were occupying his mind’s eye. When then a little owl in the dark of the yew tree over the south gate in the moonlit churchyard again suddenly screeched, he started as if at an electric shock. And twice his mouth opened before he managed to call low and hoarsely, ‘Are you there, Dick? … Dick, are you there?’

  Not a stony eyelid in the heads around him had so much as flickered at this timid challenge. The stoopin
g eagle – a large shut Bible on its outstretched wings – had stirred not a feather; the pulpit remained cavernously empty. But a few high-panelled pews, relics of the past, were within view, and even moonlight and lantern-light combined were powerless to reveal anything or anybody that might be hiding behind them. The trespasser appeared to be on the point of retiring as secretly as he had come, when a jangling gurgle, as of some monster muttering in its sleep, began to sound above his head, and the clock chimes rang out the second quarter of the hour. The vibrant metal ceased to hum; and, as if reassured by this interruption, he drew out of his pocket a large stone – a flint such as his remote ancestors would have coveted – roughly dumb-bell in shape, and now waisted with a thick and knotted length of old blindcord. This primitive weapon, long treasured for any emergency, he gently deposited on the shelf behind him, and then followed it into the pew.

  Lantern still in hand, he seated himself on the flat faded red cushion that lay along the seat. It was that of one of the mighty, the rector’s warden. Even in this half-light, as easily as a cat in the dark, he could spy out all about him now, organ-recess to gallery; but he opened his brand-new lantern nonetheless and trimmed as best he could with his finger nail its charred and oily wick. The fume and stench of the hot metal made him sneeze, whereupon he clicked-to the glass, covered it with his hand, and began listening again. ‘Sneak,’ he muttered, then suddenly plumped down on the hassock at his feet, rapidly repeated a prayer, with a glance over his shoulder half-covertly crossed himself, then as promptly sat up again; glancing as he did so at the pulpit over his head which he was accustomed to find comfortably brimmed with his father’s portly presence.