Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Philip might demur, and, if it was practicable, bargain with her; but at heart he much preferred this arrangement. It meant that on these particular Sundays he was safe from interference, and could spend the whole morning as he pleased. It was too the darkening evenings about the time of the equinox, when it was not yet necessary to light the brass oil-lamps that hung in the nave, and two solitary candlesticks alone gleamed spangling in the pulpit – it was these he loved best. Only the village and farm people came to evening service, and not many even of them. Philip would sit in his pew, and, absorbed in his secret cogitations, enjoy the whole hour. The church changed then its very being. It welled over with mystery. Even in the joy of a Harvest Festival, when he could admire the flowers and vegetables and the gigantic loaf of bread under the lectern, the bloom of grapes and apples, the minute sheaves of wheat and barley gently nodding their heads to the more impulsive strains of the organ, there was still a faint tinge of sadness. And the unheeded sermon drowsed his senses like an incantation. His father’s honeyed pulpit voice rose and fell like that of some dulcet Old Man of the Sea; and he himself, though not, like Dick, sporting and whispering noiselessly with his surpliced choir-mates out of sight of the preacher, was at any rate beyond any direct scrutiny. Meanwhile the bulky family cook, his mother’s usual proxy on these occasions, would settle down beside him into a state of apathy so complete, her cotton-gloved hands convulsively clasped over her diaphragm, that it was only by an occasional sniff he could tell that she was perhaps leading as active an internal life as he was, and was neither asleep nor dead.

  Now and then he had himself been wafted away in sleep into regions of the most exorbitant scenery, events and vagaries; to be aroused suddenly by, ‘And now to God, the Father …’, blear-eyed, lost, and with so violent a start that it had all but dislocated his neck. The most beguiling and habitual of these reveries had been concerned with the angel. How and when his speculations on it had originated, what random bird had dropped this extravagant seed of a hundred daydreams into his mind, was beyond discovery now. But it was to the cook that he had confided his first direct questions concerning it.

  One low thundery evening, during their brief solitary journey through the churchyard into the hedged-in narrow lane by the coach-house and stables, and so through the garden and back to the rectory, he had managed to blurt out, ‘Mrs Sullivan, why did they make the angel so as she can’t blow the trumpet?’ And this although his mind had been busied over the wholly different and more advanced problem – What exactly would happen if for any reason she ever did?

  Until this moment Mrs Sullivan had been unaware of the angel’s perpetual predicament, and her attitude was cautious and tentative.

  ‘I expect,’ she said, ‘it was because they couldn’t help themselves. Besides, Master Philip, what you are talking about isn’t a real angel, no more than what her trumpet is a real trumpet. And who’s to say if even a real angel could blow a trumpet that isn’t real. I wouldn’t care to go so far as that myself. Besides who’s to know as she is a she?’

  Here, in this darker quiet, under the thick-leaved ilexes, Philip always drew a little nearer to his stout and panting companion; and sometimes for reassurance slipped a hand under her elbow. Free again, and the stars visible in the autumn sky, he had ventured to protest.

  ‘But why couldn’t they? And of course it’s a she. Besides it was I who said she can’t. I told you. It’s three inches at least from her mouth. Like this. I’ve measured it heaps and heaps of times.’

  ‘“Measured it” Master Philip! Well, that’s a nice thing to be getting up to! All I can say is if that’s the kind of mischief you are after I don’t know what your father wouldn’t say.’

  ‘I didn’t mean really,’ was the impatient reply. ‘How could I? I meant by looking, of course. How could I mean “really”?’ There was scorn in his voice, even though his question had fallen like a hint from heaven into the quiet of his mind.

  ‘If it’s just guessing,’ Mrs Sullivan had complacently decided, ‘I wouldn’t suppose it could be three. And, though your young eyes may be better than mine, it might be no more than just a shadow … It looks as if it had been raining, according to all these puddles.’

  Philip had paid no attention to the puddles, except that he had continued to enjoy quietly walking through them. ‘But you said just now,’ he persisted, ‘that you’d never even seen the angel. So how can you possibly tell? Anyhow, it is three, it’s more than three, it’s more likely four or five. You don’t seem to remember how far she is up under the roof. Why, the end of her trumpet nearly touches the ceiling. I think that was silly. Why didn’t they?’

  They were drifting back to his original riddle again. But Mrs Sullivan, reminded of another kind of trumpet, was meditating vaguely at this moment on a deaf bedridden sister who lived in the Midlands. ‘I never knew a boy with so many questions,’ she answered him ruminatively, almost as if she were explaining the situation to a third party. ‘I suppose it’s because the Last Day hasn’t risen on us as yet. That at least is what it was meant to mean for the gentleman that’s laid in the tomb beneath it – and for all of us for that matter. God send it never may!’

  ‘You mean you think she is waiting for the Last Day? I don’t know what you mean by “never”. There must be a Last Day, and that would be the Last Day. And if she’s waiting for that, what will happen then – after the last?’

  ‘Well, Master Philip, if you are the son of your own father, which I take you to be, you should best be able to answer that question for yourself. I don’t hold with such pryings. It’s far from ready I’m likely to be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ said Mrs Sullivan, ‘I’m getting old, and time is not what it was. When I was a young girl I nearly brooded all the blood out of my body thinking of things like that; though you might not suppose so now. Not that the young should or need be doing so, though I’m not saying there’s no need even for them not to mind their p’s and q’s. There is.’

  ‘What are p’s and q’s?’

  But this tepid and lifeless inquiry might have been borne on the winds of Arabia, it seemed so far away.

  ‘Goodness gracious, you’ve got a tongue like an empty money-box. I see your mamma has gone to bed. Let’s hope her sick headache is no worse. And here comes the Rector.’

  Philip had accepted Mrs Sullivan’s complex solution of his difficulty with reservations, and had pondered continually on parts of it. After that, apart perhaps from a stray dog or bird, or a strange human face, nothing in church, or in the scriptures, not even Jezebel or the Scarlet Woman, or Gideon, or Og, or Samson’s foxes in the wheat, or golden Absalom hanging in the oak tree, or hairy Esau with his mess of pottage, or Elisha and the widow’s cruse – nothing had so instantly galvanized him into a rapt attention as the least word he heard uttered about an angel or a trumpet. He had even taken to searching the Bible on his own account to satisfy his craving.

  Tonight, nonetheless, was the first time he had ever been alone with his angel – wholly alone. And he had risked a good deal for her sake – a caning from his father; a break-neck fall from his bedroom window if the clothesline had proved as rotten as it looked; a scurry, heart in mouth, through the fusty dark of the shrubbery; and the possibility, far more affrighting than he had confessed, of strange meetings at the lych gate. Besides there was the humiliation of having been beguiled into this crazy expedition by a friend who was frowned at if not forbidden, and who was not only one of the ‘village boys’, but clouded and compromised at that.

  It was a companionship that fretted Philip at times almost beyond bearing, but from which he could not contrive to break free. Scrubbed and polished Dick might be, but he never looked clean. He could be stupider than an owl, and yet was as sharp and quick as a pygmy sparrow-hawk, and feared nothing and nobody. Sometimes even the mere sight of his intent, small-nosed face, and its dark eyes, now darting with life and eagerness, now laden with an inscrutable melancholy; of
his very hands, even, small and quick, and his tiny pointed ears filled Philip with an acute distaste. Yet there was a curious and continual fascination in his company.

  He was like a mysterious and unintelligible little animal, past caging or taming, and possessed of a spirit of whose secret presence he himself was completely unaware. Contrariwise, he could be as demure, submissive and affectionate as a little girl, and it was past all hope to discover where his small mind was ranging. Philip admired, despised, was jealous of, and sometimes bitterly hated him.

  Why, he wondered, did his father always become so flustered and unreasonable at the mere mention of his name; or why his mother either, for that matter? If an unexpected tradesman’s bill from London or the county town accompanied his Morning Post, why was the heated discussion of this particular topic almost bound sooner or later to follow? First ‘words’ – and these of a steadily densening drift; a desultory wrangle; but at last his mother, flaming with anger, in tears, would flare up like a loose heap of gunpowder, and his father would subside into a sulky and cowed acquiescence.

  Even if Dick was not the son of the sober and crusted old wheelwright at the other end of the village, what did that matter? And if Dick’s mother was so close a confidante of his own mother, what did that? Wasn’t there every reason why she should be? Only a few years before this, she had been parlour-maid at the Rectory, a quiet, fair, meditative creature. And then all of a sudden she had left and got married. But she was still the best ‘help’ in the house imaginable. No one could wait at table so deftly and sedately as she could; and not even Philip’s indolent and elegant mother was such a marvel with her needle. And yet she was so quiet and so far-away that when suddenly spoken to she would start and flush as if she had but just come out of some secret hiding-place.

  It was only the spiteful new cook, Mrs Sullivan’s successor, who had steadily refused to be won over; and Philip hated her anyhow. His father, on the other hand, took no more notice of Dick when he passed him by in the Rectory garden than if he had been a toadstool.

  It was a mystery. If ever on any rare feast or festival, there was a solo to be sung in the minute village choir, it was Dick who sang it – ‘As pants the hart’, ‘With verdure clad’ – and as roundly and sweetly and passionlessly as the strains of some small woodland flute. His voice at any rate would need no angelic tuition – even in a better world. Nevertheless, although the Rector had been known to boast of the prowess of his choir, Philip could not recall a single word of commendation from his father after the service was over, not even so much as a pompous little pat on the head. So far as he was concerned, Dick might have been a deaf-mute.

  Yet if nuts, or peppermints, or marbles, or a grasshopper, or a glow-worm in a matchbox were brought into church for furtive display, and Dick was discovered to be the culprit, very little happened. Other boys when they were caught were given a good lecture in the Rector’s study, and one runagate far less enterprising than Dick had been expelled from the choir.

  However closely he listened, Philip could never unravel the secret of this mystery. Even when he most enjoyed Dick’s company, he could never for a moment conceal his own sense of superiority. At one moment he might be green with envy of Dick’s silly, dare-devil, scatter-brained ways; at the next utterly despise him. There was a perpetual conflict in his mind between affection, jealousy and contempt. And Dick would detect these secret feelings, as they were expressed solely in his face and actions, as neatly and quickly as a robin pecks up crumbs. Yet he never referred to them, or for more than a minute or two together seemed to resent a single one.

  Just now, however, his protective stone and the increasing stench of his lantern unheeded, Philip had all but forgotten what had brought him into his present extraordinary situation. Like the restless imp he always was, Dick had taken himself off. Let him stay away, then! Meanwhile he had himself sat stolidly on, lost in contemplation, the prey of the most fantastic and ridiculous hopes and forebodings.

  The church was brimmed so full of limpid moonlight that at any moment, it seemed, the stone walls, the pulpit, the roof itself might vanish away like the fabric of a dream. Its contents appeared to have no more reality than the reflections in a glass. Every crevice in the mouldings of the arches, every sunken flower and leaf in the mullions of the windows, even the knot in the wood of the pew beneath his nose stood out as if it had been blacked in with Indian ink. Every jut and angle, corbel and finial, marble nose and toe and finger seemed to have been dipped in quicksilver. And Philip, his eyes fixed on the faintly golden, winged, ecstatic figure – mutely ‘shaking her gilded tresses in the air’ – whose gaze he pined and yet feared even in imagination to meet, was lost for the time being to the world of the actual. He failed even to notice urgent reminders that one of his legs from knee to foot had gone numb, and that he was stone-cold.

  The premonitory whirring rumble of the clock over his head and the chimes of midnight roused him at last from this lethargy. He ‘came to’, and listened starkly to the muffled, sullen booming of the bell, as if he had suddenly escaped from the mazes of a dream. ‘… Eleven … Twelve’. The sonorous vibrations ebbed into inaudibility, and a dead and empty silence again prevailed. He had steadily assured himself, from the moment the project had been decided on, that nothing would happen. Nothing had happened. He felt spiritless and vacant, and now realized miserably that in spite of this radiance and beauty, he was further away from his angel than he had ever been before. It was she who had withdrawn herself from him, and with that withdrawal a faltering speechless faith and belief in her had almost faded out of his heart.

  And as he crouched there, chilled and sick, there rose suddenly into the night beyond the chancel windows a restrained yet fiendish screech, compared with which his own Oh, oh, oh, had been sweet as the lamentations of a mermaid. Even though he had instantly guessed its origin, he sat appalled. His eyes fixed on the heavy folds of the curtain that had softly swayed forward as if in a waft of the wind through the open door, he had in his horror almost ceased to breathe. What if he were mistaken? What ghoulish wraith might not be skulking there! All but indetectably the curtain was edging apart to disclose at length a lean faceless shape draped as if with a shroud from its flat-topped shapeless and featureless head downwards. Even in his consternation he marvelled at the delicate play of the moonlight in the folds of the cambric. With pointing sooty finger, this ridiculous scarecrow had now begun noiselessly edging towards his pew. The effort to prevent a yell of terror from escaping his throat had brought the taste of blood to Philip’s lip; and he at once fell into a violent passion.

  ‘You’re nothing but a damn silly little fathead,’ he bawled, as it were, under his breath, ‘and it would serve you jolly well right if I gave you a good licking. Stop that rot! Stop it! Come out! I say!’

  The spectre, notwithstanding, had fallen into a solemn yet nimble negro shuffle and a voice out of its middle began to intone:

  Dearly beloved brethren, is it not a sin

  To eat raw potatoes and throw away the skin?

  The skin feeds the pigs and the pigs feed you;

  Dearly beloved brethren, is – it – not – TRUE?

  Pat with the last word, and having flung off the Rector’s surplice and discarded the semi-hairless broom of the old church charwoman, Dick edged out of his disguise, looking smaller and skinnier than ever. Then it was as if his high spirits, having learned that the same jest is seldom successful twice, had been crushed out of him for good by this last rebuke. He stood dumbly staring at Philip, like a stricken and downcast little monkey that has been chastised by its master.

  ‘Keep your silly wig on,’ he expostulated at last. ‘That’s what you always do. You can’t take any joke unless you’ve made it yourself. I’m tired of being here. There’s nothing coming – and there never was. Perhaps if you had been alone …’ Unstable as water, his mood began to revive again. ‘I know! Let’s go down to the mill-pond, Philip, and look at the fish. The moon’s like gl
ass. You could catch ’em with your hands with that lantern. Let’s try. Come on.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ retorted Philip morosely. ‘You needn’t suppose you’re going to wriggle out like that. You dared me to come, and I dare you to stay. Anyhow, you shan’t put your nose ever into our house again or into the garden, either, I can promise you, if you’re nothing but a sneak – and afraid. I know something that will soon put a stop to that.’

  Dick stood irresolute, eyeing him sharply, his high cheekbones a bright red, his eyes shining, his mouth ajar.

  ‘I’m not a sneak. And who’ – a doleful quaver jarred his thin clear treble voice – ‘who wants to come into your silly old garden. If my mother … Besides, you know I’m not afraid!’

  ‘Oh, do I!’ A crafty stealthy designing look had crept into Philip’s fair face, and a slight haze into his blue eyes. A faint ambiguous smile faded out of his angel features. He glanced covertly about him. ‘What’s more likely is you only want to show off,’ he sneered. ‘Wheedle.’ He half yawned. ‘You know perfectly well that I shouldn’t be here now except for some silly story you told me and couldn’t have understood. Dare for yourself! Why, you haven’t even the pluck to climb up into the belfry and give the least tiny ding on one of the bells. Not all alone.’

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t I! Yes, I would. Where’s the key? There’s an old owl’s nest in the belfry … “One!” – why, even if anybody in the village woke and heard it, they’d think it was nothing but the wind.’

  ‘Well, three dings, then. Anybody can make excuses. And you knew I haven’t the key! What’s more, you wouldn’t take a single flower, not even a scrap of a green leaf, from one of those vases up there.’