Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Of George, there was no trace in the little room. Although Nora had been engaged to him for weeks now, his photograph was still shut up in a drawer.

  Why, she hardly knew. She didn’t mind Alf and Sidney watching her dressing and undressing out of their skimpy little frames. They had nothing to do with it. Why George, then? He was coming this evening to Sunday supper; to be introduced to Uncle Ben and Aunt Emma. Nora shifted uneasily. She recalled other family reunions. She hadn’t forgotten the evening when her Uncle Joseph, who had finally emigrated to Australia, brought his wife and children to see them. Nor her own Confirmation either! But Mrs Hopper had known George and his family for years; from when he was a little boy, his hair smarmed down with hair oil, and his small square snubby nose in the middle of his face. He and Nora were going to be married.

  She looked up sharply, rose to her feet, her mind made up. She would set off to ‘the Ponds’ at once. Her father was safe downstairs in his easy-chair, his handkerchief over his head. It was the one thing he couldn’t abide – flies. And her mother in the next room, for the time being at least, must be far beyond all interest in Nora’s doings – her patchwork quilt half drawn up over her petticoats, the rest of her completely negligé.

  Nora’s sudden hasty activity, however, had not been entirely unheeded. Her fiancé had at last realized that the young lady up above wasn’t concerned just now with him and his ‘fancy’. He wasn’t hurt; no fear: she had her moods and her silences. Pretending not to have been even hoping, he clapped his hands, and Nora watched from under the brim of the hat she was putting on before her looking-glass as – with a sudden drumming flutter and scurry – away went the beautiful birds up into the vacant heavens, their wings, cold and white as drifted snow, clapping together under the blue of the sky beneath the furious gaze of the sun. They gathered, they circled, they returned – as they always returned; back to their little pagoda-like dove-cote, back to Mr Trimmins’s sleek green-and-white greenhouse with its ripening tomatoes.

  Her hatpin between her teeth, Nora decided that he really was a good sensible sort – that young Mr Trimmins, in spite of his being such a sobersides and in spite of the interest and time he lavished on his almost uncanny knack with pigeons and tomatoes.

  She pushed home the pin, and in a few moments had slipped out into the blinding afternoon. The street was deserted. Its opposite row of yellow brick houses sat roasting in the sun, as if they had been hollowed out of one lump of clay and now were crisp and finished. Someone was playing a hymn on a harmonium. The sound of it intensified the heat fourfold. But Nora didn’t mind the heat. She loved it. Yet still, as she hastened on, with a steady clack-clack-clack of her best shoe-heels on the glinting flagstones, something in her mind was doing its utmost to persuade her to turn back. But no; those full red lips closed more firmly; the sensible thing to do was to face things out. And on she went.

  At the end of the next street she boarded a tram, and edged herself in on to the hole-patterned seat immediately facing a family of Sunday merrymakers – the father (with his little dark moustache), the mother (her ringed left hand pressed close against the bag she carried), and their three small children in a row beside them – six, four, and two – with completely motionless bodies, and unceasingly active red-brown eyes.

  It was stuffy in the tram. Nora watched the stagnant shut-up shops slide by – the butcher’s, the draper’s, the dairy, the fried-fish shop. The Admiral Napier – with its chipped padlocked brown doors – suggested a frivolous attempt at disguising itself as a morgue, its upper paint a leprous grey. The confectioners’ were open, though; and so were the tobacconists’. She could see the boys, squatting on stools in their Sunday clothes, eating ices; and Mr Jobson in his shirt-sleeves leaning over the last of his Sunday newspapers, smoking one of his own minute black cigars. ‘Triple murder in Kensal Green. Blood-stained chopper found.’ ‘Well-known Peer charged with Bigamy.’ The placards were always exciting on Sundays. Nora’s gliding dark-blue eyes snatched at their novelties as the tram in its steel grooves lurched on. It was the world she was used to and it intensely interested her. But when at length she reached ‘the Ponds’ – their shelving banks shaded with lofty, bowering willows, green and silver in the motionless sunlit air – they were all but deserted. At this first glimpse of them again Nora sighed. Just that one deep draught of sweeter air that had filled her lungs, had stilled her mind, set her heart beating. Her dark eyes had become almost as placid and absent as her father’s. The water lay there, unruffled by even the faintest motion of the air, and blue as a plate beneath the sky. On the farther bank, but so far away that their shrill voices sounded not much louder than starlings’, a swarm of small boys were disporting themselves; some shying stones into the water, while two or three of them were drying themselves in the sun – small, lean creatures, standing mother-naked under the bowl of the sky on the warm green turf.

  And Nora at length softly turned her eyes towards her tree. This, too, was a willow, but it was a good many years older than most of its companions, and in part devoured and hollowed by rot. It leaned far out over the water from its few feet of grass-green sandy bank. And, as she looked at it, the complete experience of the night before flooded back into memory.

  It wasn’t as if that had been her first nocturnal visit. This, indeed, was one of Nora’s own few secret resorts. She was ‘friends’ with the place. She had paddled in its shallows with her school-mates, when quite a little girl. She knew its dangers; had been warned of them again and again. How then could she have been so stupid, so idiotic? To have stooped there remotely day-dreaming in that quiet starry darkness, leaning so far out over the water, with the perfectly ridiculous intention of trying to see her face in that dark mirror. The folly of it! As if to bid it good-bye! It would have served her right to have fallen in for good and all. What actually had happened – nothing so tragic – had happened in the twinkling of an eye.

  Either in sheer absent-mindedness, or because she had been startled suddenly by the squawking of a little owl in the branches over her head, her fingers had slipped, and in she had gone. Down, down – like a stone, into the cold, greedy, caressing water. And, in an instant or two, though it had seemed an age, and an age crammed with a wild incoherent disturbing dream, she had come up again, panting, terrified, clutching; trembling, shuddering, but safe.

  Better to have drowned almost than to have proved oneself such a silly! But it was then – as if it were hovering in the darkness of the air – that that strange phantom face had appeared. She had found herself gazing straight up into it; though whether, with the water streaming from her hair, her eyes were open or shut, she could not remember. It was through those few everlasting moments the face had stayed there, lit faintly as if by some light of its own, smiling, seraphic, unchanging, the eyes faintly luminous, the cheek narrowing softly to the chin, the hair drawn gently backward from the brows.

  At length, and none too easily, Nora had pulled herself out, up on to the bank, had sat there, exhausted a while, to recover her breath, her safety, and her wits. And then, having wrung some of the water out of her clothes, she had hurried off home by as obscure a route as she knew, and so up to her bedroom. Her mother had been ironing in the kitchen when she left home. One of the flat-irons still sat cooling on the scorch-patterned ironing-sheet beside its holder. Nora had glanced at it as she came in. And like everything else in the kitchen, it seemed to be in collusion with her – and to be professing it! ‘We know; it’s over now; don’t be afraid. We shan’t split!’

  Nonetheless Mrs Hopper’s sharp eyes had instantly noticed the change of clothes. ‘I thought you said George wasn’t coming tonight? You haven’t put a plate for him.’

  And Nora, without a word, had gone to the dresser to fetch one.

  Why had she prevaricated? What was there to conceal? She didn’t mind her mother. Why hadn’t she confessed straight out that like a fool she had fallen into the water, and had had the sense to change her clothes? To tell the
truth was as much a habit with her as to wash her face in the morning and to do her hair. Yet she had looked back at her mother, as if she had been accustomed to telling lies all her life – lies shameless, brazen. Yet even while she did so, she had been perfectly conscious of that faintly outlined face still haunting senses, memory, heart and mind. And it seemed to have no more connection with her mother, no more connection with telling the truth, and with living one’s ordinary life than – well, Nora had no comparison.

  A young man and a young woman were now straying hand in hand aimlessly and vacantly in her direction along the bank of the Ponds. The three small boys were squatting on the green grass in their shirts. The sun had descended a little in its narrowing autumnal arc. Nora, after yet another fleeting half-glance at the scene spread out before her, turned back and hastened home.

  Sunday tea was never a talkative meal. Unlike her husband, Mrs Hopper was a heavy sleeper after meals, and – her Sabbath afternoon hour over – she invariably stumped down from her bedroom, cross, flushed and staring, and with sleep-glazed eyes, like a gently gaping fish. This afternoon, the meal was briefer than usual. There was High Tea or Early Supper to get. And Uncle Ben had a critical eye and a fastidious palate. But there’s nothing like getting busy and working hard at whatever comes next, to prevent one’s mind from brooding on what one is trying not to remember. Nora even sang over the peeling of the potatoes, and Mrs Hopper wondered, on hearing her, why when she herself was young, she had been so squeamish, so strait-laced. Alf had been a good husband as husbands go, but there are all kinds of men.

  In spite of her mother’s rather cantankerous snort at the arrangement, Nora seated herself between her father and Aunt Emma at the supper-table. But Mrs Hopper was a woman as easily placated as she was put out; and her hospitality was second-nature to her. ‘There’s Elf, now,’ she would explain. ‘He can’t be anywhere but he’s alone. He can’t be anywhere but cooped up in his shell. Not me! Give me faces; give me company; give me talk. I’d mope me head off with nobody to see.’

  There was no doubt of it. The dark round table, with its cold boiled leg of mutton, its steak-and-kidney pie, pickles and beetroot, and glass and cutlery, and the china lamp in the middle, was packed as close with humanity as chairs would allow. They might be animals colloguing together. Yet Mr Hopper merely sat quietly smiling there, and looking as much alone as if he were an ascetic Robinson Crusoe on his desert island.

  Uncle Ben, however, having assured himself that his sister-in-law hadn’t forgotten his distaste for bottled beer and his ‘pongshong’ for whisky, had lost no chance to keep up his reputation as a wag, and a lady-killer. And, with Aunt Emma for flattering ally, and Miss Mullings, as a new victim so far as he was concerned – sidling but appreciative – for audience, there was soon an unceasing roar of talk and laughter. And as naturally as flies round a chandelier, it had circled about the guest of the evening – the doomed bachelor, the greenhorn of matrimony, the wise-crack’s easiest cockshy – George. George was solid; George was a stayer; a bit thick-headed, if you like, but none the worse for that perhaps when life wields so clumsy a club and cracks a sensitive skull as easily as a steam-hammer cracks eggs. George was there; to bear the brunt, to play the butt, the future bridegroom! And George, in his tight starched collar and ‘neat’ pepper-and-salt suit, had met every sally with unfailing good-humour, even though, with his head bent forward a little and his dark brown eyes slightly bulging, he resembled the while a bullock staring out of a cattle-truck.

  Uncle Ben had the richest stock of jokes for all occasions – from a christening to a funeral. But his marrowiest were on the subject of widows, mothers-in-law, and young people in love.

  ‘Lor’, now, Ben,’ Mrs Hopper had come to the rescue at last, ‘give him a chance; give him a chance!’ With a hiccup of ribald amusement and a sigh of exhaustion, she wiped away the tears from her eyes.

  ‘Chance!’ retorted Uncle Ben, turning his long nose in her direction. ‘What’s he want with chances? Hasn’t he had his chance, and hasn’t he taken it? … And won’t he?’

  George shifted an inch or two on his chair.

  ‘He don’t want no chances.’ Aunt Em intervened, drawing her hand across her mouth. ‘He’s happy enough, I can see, and so would any young man be.’

  ‘What I say is,’ said Uncle Ben, with extraordinary solemnity and almost squinting at his friends, from eyes that were, even at ordinary moments, formidably close together, ‘what I say is, he’s joined the old redoubtables. He’s taken the plunge – and come up smiling.’ He looked firmly at the tumbler in his hand.

  ‘Anybody, to hear that, Mr Hopper,’ Miss Mullings insinuated, ‘would suppose that a journey to the altar was no better than a young couple going to their execution.’

  ‘Altar, did you say, Miss Mullings, or halter?’ inquired Uncle Ben punctiliously. ‘And what, might I ask you, does anybody expect at an execution? Why, to lose his head! Aye, and to have it picked up out of the sawdust before the trickling lids are down over the eyes. When I think of our young friends on that track – well, there –’ his voice sank into a plangent whisper and he emptied his glass, ‘my heart bleeds for them.’

  ‘Pull the long bow, you do,’ Mrs Hopper expostulated. ‘Why, if it wasn’t telling secrets, I recollect a time, Ben, when you as near as possible fell into the trap yourself; and a nice plump young widow, too, though I’m not too sure all that hair was her own!’

  Mr Hopper, who had been steadily and quietly eating the while, at this, gently slid his eyes in his brother’s direction, and smiled. It was like a watery glint of sunlight in a raining sky.

  ‘That,’ retorted Uncle Ben imperturbably, ‘is what might look to be a bulls-eye. But, “twice shy” is my rendering of it. I read the other day, in an old book I came across, of two islands out in the East there, three hundred miles apart. Two islands: one inhabited by nothing but men, and the other by – well, in short – women. So I know where I’m going to when I die.’

  ‘But which, Mr Hopper?’ murmured Miss Mullings.

  Uncle Ben threw up his two knuckly hands. ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ he cried. ‘Now George, here …’ he began again.

  George pushed his chin a little further over his stiff collar; and swallowed.

  ‘There’s some of us not so easily taken in,’ he muttered thickly. ‘What I say is, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’

  The worm had turned, but at the sound of his voice, Nora had begun hastily collecting the dirty plates together in preparation for the plum tart and custard and a plum-pudding that Mrs Hopper, since the Christmas before, had faithfully reserved for whatever occasion Providence might propose.

  And it was not until after the supper dishes had been cleared away, and Uncle Ben – who didn’t think even as much as small beer of ‘all this Voder-veal’ – had entertained the company with a few out of his familiar repertory of songs, that the attention of the little party suddenly centred itself on Nora. From her brief solitude in the scullery she had slipped back into the room again and seated herself beside her father. His hand had crept out and gently clasped her own for a moment, where it lay in her lap, palm upwards, on her knee.

  Aunt Emma, at the same moment, with a curious, crab-like movement, had slipped from her stool at the old rose-wood, silk-pleated piano, and Uncle Ben, whose third song had not been received with precisely the volume of applause to which he was accustomed, had observed this furtive little caress.

  ‘Now, if I was a goose,’ he cried gallantly, ‘there’s one young lady present which I don’t believe could say boh to me no how. What do you think, pretty Miss Pensive, now, with them dark eyes?’

  Mrs Hopper who, up to this moment, had seemed to be completely unaware of her daughter’s small share in the evening’s entertainment, suddenly lost patience.

  ‘God’s sake! She’s sat there, dumb as an image, all the blessed evening. What’s wrong with you, girl?’

  At this, George’s eyes, which had been as st
eadily fixed on his beloved as a bullock’s in a truck on a drift of green pasture at the railroad’s edge, turned heavily away, while a dull red mounted up into his naturally dusky face.

  ‘I’m all right, Mother,’ said Nora.

  She was alone in the world again; for at first sound of Mrs Hopper’s rebuke, Mr Hopper had withdrawn his hand.

  ‘If you was “all right” as you call it,’ retorted Mrs Hopper, ‘you’d prove you had a tongue in your head. She’s been like this for days together,’ she explained to Aunt Emma. ‘I can’t think what’s come over the child.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not feeling quite the thing,’ Miss Mullings suggested sympathetically.

  ‘Now then, George! What about it?’ challenged Uncle Ben, in full tilt again at the dragon.

  Nora had pushed herself more securely into her chair. ‘I don’t mind being laughed at, not a bit,’ she began. ‘Not myself. If I couldn’t stand being laughed at, I’d go into a home for the feeble-minded. But I don’t believe even you, Uncle Ben, would be talking quite so free if you’d been nearly drowned last night.’

  The strange dismal word resounded through the little lamplit room like the call of a bugle. Complete silence fell. Uncle Ben gaped where he stood. Then Mrs Hopper crossed her legs viciously, and clasped her hands together.

  ‘What kind of tale are you telling of us now?’ she cried angrily.