Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  I was still nibbling my pencil.

  ‘Because, my simple friend, the numskulls had suddenly realized that of all creatures here on earth the Englishman is the most super-fattedly lethargic, dense, and servile. As cannon fodder, I mean; and is content to be. He battens on sentiment, is the sport of silly day-dreams, and judging from much of his poetry – poetry forsooth! – the victim of idealism. It accounts very largely for the mixture of Martha and Mary in your compatriots, for which I cannot express my contempt. It is the lukewarm which I too spue out of my mouth. That virus came in with their fairy books. The autocrat needs serfs for his use. Moreover in the adult, believe me, I am all for imagination. It is the poison on which fatten those detestable weeds, faith, hope, and charity. Hope indeed! Ha, ha! … I see you have written down scarcely a syllable in your pretty little book.’

  He stretched his lean arm towards the green stuff in the bottle. But perhaps it was the flush of shame at his last comment that had clouded my eyes. I could see the great man less plainly now. The skies beyond the windows were reddening – though I hoped most sincerely in view of my Editor’s instructions this was not due to the colours of the sunset. The flames of the Like-Lite were almost impish in their gyrations.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ a voice dwindling into the distance was asseverating, ‘you …’ (I could not be perfectly sure of the missing words) ‘you neophyte. You – simple Simon. Castles in Spain, eh? …’

  I had not cared for the timbre, the cadence, of the remark; had risen a little hastily and withdrawn. I opened, then shut the door behind me, and found myself in a corridor, its paint far whiter than the aisles of a sinking ship. I all but trotted along and reached a door – a door, it appeared, of thrice-refined brass. Was it locked? No. With a prodigious tug I dragged it open. And there, beyond, a supreme whiteness. A frozen savanna all of snow. Had the Like-Lite and the personage who had failed to warm me at its flames been less absolutely actual – for, after all, the real is far less substantial in effect – I might have imagined myself to be in a dream. Not at all.

  An immense holly-tree conspicuously artificial in appearance was loaded with blood-red berries and singular little toys. Unlike so many that are cheap, I fancied they also looked nasty. Three small wax boys, borrowed apparently from the Marylebone Road, were set up in the snow as if they were snow-balling. Their cheeks were of a far more vivid sanguine than even Charles Dickens would have approved of. A little beyond the gigantic porch, for I had left the house by a side door, a group of badly stuffed scarecrows armed with french horns, tubas, and trombones were, to judge from their jerks, engaged in (I fancy) The First Nowell. And I had never before realized how eloquent a satire silence can be on sound. A crystal or two out of the empty air lodged on my lip. I could not help but smile. It was not of snow. It was of salt; and the creature that had occasioned it dropped at that very moment at my feet: the facsimile of a little robin redbreast, though it was obviously as dead as mutton. And he began to sing! Certainly I was come, or rather had been sent, to a very strange establishment. Very massive, it looked too, and, peculiar paradox, both incredibly old and brand new.

  Beyond the savanna of salt there lay a vague and far horizon line, either of smoke or water. Unless Los Angeles actually had me in their keeping, the smoke might well be London. The tiniest tack of sound behind me drew my chin towards my shoulder. And it was then I perceived a large bronze door-plate attached to the wall, over which strayed a most ridiculous imitation of variegated ivy. I gazed at its inscription in consternation: H.E. THE SHAM OF SHAMS, A.B.R.; A.C.; A.D.; A.B.R.A. (99th Secretary to the Old Gentleman Himself). In consternation, I say, for I had been instructed to interview the latter. And at this very moment I fancied I heard behind me the susurrus, nothing more, of a low and privy laughter. Under the greenish skies I trudged off at once into the salt.

  * London Mercury, November 1936.

  The Miller’s Tale*

  It had been dark for many hours, that thick darkness when the year is old – and Orion was risen into the deep skies – when I left the valley and began to ascend the steep hill-side. I had been ranging unfamiliar country; and rejoiced to find myself issuing out of the more than nocturnal gloom of the valley I had been traversing – a valley with darker hollows, occasional impenetrable thickets – impenetrable, I mean, by the eye; and particularly to be free from its more or less concealed and inscrutable, and yet, as I felt within me, its attentive and sinister denizens or inmates.

  Since set of a wintry sun I had made the mill my guiding landmark – a great conspicuous mill. This I had followed from afar, for the night being bleak and unusually dark, the mill was set on high in the cold air, almost as clear against the stars as it had showed at evening against the sun. My eyes had now become accustomed to the darkness, made palely visible with hoar-frost on the misty fields, so that when on a sudden a swift flame rent that height, leaping and running, almost in an instant, from base to summit of the mill, I stood awhile astonished and abashed at the amazing glare.

  But when I heard the distinct crackling of the rending timber, and the gurgle and uprush of the flames, and saw all the edifice as it were a tall flame on the hill’s crest, and the little tongues of flame sallying from sail to sail along the immense arms, I hastened on, eager to discover if the miller were in safety or needed my aid.

  As I approached, the illumination increased to such a degree that the night was driven back scores of yards: only the distant ridges of the hills lay the more obscure along the horizon. The incessant tumultuous roaring, the energy and fleetness of the fire, to see the arms of the mill extended in that flaming vesture, and to feel the heat of the fire upon my face as I pressed further into the girdle of its influence, whetted my desire to learn the cause of this sudden conflagration. Moreover, having retained the dark mill so long the target of my eye, now to view it so incredibly transformed in this consummation of light I was moved with superstitious wonder and dread. But I am used to night journeys, and solitary places, and must add that apprehension for the poor miller and merely a moth-like curiosity were rather my incitement to set off running towards the vivid centre of flame in that unnight-like area.

  The little wind there was scarcely moved the ascending pillar of smoke, but presently, at some fifty feet from the wagging extremity of the flames, it flagged and went off, a little dispersed westward, but no breath of it towards me. Yet still I smelled the acrid burning, and saw the clearer for this very cause the intense kernel of the fire.

  Somewhat to the left of the mill a few fine elms grew together, their bare twigs and branches like glowing veins upon the sky; and, standing beneath these, staring on his burning mill, I perceived a man whom from his whiteness I discerned to be the miller. At a little distance from him a woman sat crouched on the ground, with a child of a few years old in her lap which was hiding its face in her bosom. The woman’s plaited hair and the child’s elfin locks were both red in hue. I tell this as well to show how such trifles impress themselves on an excited imagination as to prove how fierce a radiance beat there, for I saw them as it were a June noonday. And this though I threw them at first only a glance, nor looked more closely on them until the fire was afterwards fallen a little lower.

  This miller was a fine, tall man, and he stood, his great hands idle at his sides, staring unmoved at his roaring house. Ever and again a vivid brand would be pitched out from the sails and would fall perhaps almost at his feet to hiss itself out in the frosty grass; and the sparks went up in hosts like bees. But he maintained without heed his vacant gaze. I was astonished at the supinity of the man, and shouted above the clamour and crackling, asking him if there was no pool or well and buckets hereabouts, or where help might be sought from his neighbours.

  But he turned on me with a great voice: ‘I beg you not meddle, sir, the mill is my own and was my father’s before me: it shall burn till it smoulder on the field. Do you think, sir, I would set my all on fire without cause? It is the bonfire of God that is younder a-burni
ng; soon will the fiends come from every corner of hell, smelling out the smoke; ay, you shall see the villains for yourself if you will but keep at my side without stirring.’

  It was plain the poor miller was demented, and had himself been the wilful incendiary. Yet he spoke dispassionately, though his blue eyes rolled like glass, and his presence of powdery whiteness was portentous in the glare. I questioned the good man, and won from him little by little in disjointed sentences, which he roared at me with all his lungs because of the turbulence of the fire, a very curious narrative.

  It seems, in the first place, that the desolate situation of the mill was never in its favour as a means of livelihood. Once on a time perhaps, this had not been so, but in the slow cataract of Eternal Time man is very transitory, and now for many years past the people in the village along the valley had much diminished in numbers. But, whether by reason of pestilence or emigration or want I did not gather; in consequence of this the miller’s trade dwindled also until of late it was good for nothing, and barely supported himself and his wife in common food and clothing.

  Solitary in these hilly regions, a man apt to brood in secret, his occupation gone, I take it that the perpetual gnawing and chafing of need and famine had cankered the miller’s wits. Else there are things well nigh too far beyond credulity in his story to be accepted for truth.

  It was in late summer that the miller woke one night and thought to hear in his bed the movement of the sails. He lay wide awake instantly intent on the sound, until presently after it ceased and he fell quietly asleep. Broad day supposes all night’s doings the phantasy of dreams. But when some two or three weeks after, and when many actual dreams had troubled his head that might have been caused by such inexplicable sounds, he heard again, in the very womb of night, the sails circling before a brisk wind, he rose in haste and looked out of his little window on the mill.

  He had not been mistaken, for the lofty sails were sweeping in their circuit merrily enough; and, in great perturbation, he watched their flitting until break of day, misliking to venture out into the darkness. And then when he did go out, his mill was all for all as he had left it last thing the evening before, the great pole in its self-same place.

  For many a night after, when his wife was sound asleep, he rose to keep watch, and at last about harvest-tide the mill again was astir, rocking, creaking, rumbling, yet none to direct, and nought to be ground.

  This time with his heart in his mouth the miller crept stealthily out of his door and mounted the steep ladder of his mill and put his key in the door. But at that (he told me), there came a loud flurry as of large wild wings, the wind fell to nothing, the millstones ceased to revolve.

  But still, after a moment of dreadful doubt he flings open the door to discover all the mill to be quite vacant and nothing uncommon, save only for this alongside the bins – a canvas bag of tares. And I asked the miller again, and he repeated – ‘a bag of tares’. At which (he told me), he trembled from head to foot and fled down from his mill. Nor dared he keep watch any more, nor rise up at the sound of his mill grinding in the night, nor yet breathe a word to his wife or neighbours. (And this I cannot but fancy was some proof of an imbecile understanding.) But he would lie quaking throughout the interminable black hours of winter, till his body became emaciated, and his mind awry, as well indeed it might be.

  Thus things continued until, in the beginning of April of the same year, the miller was sitting at his door in the green and rosy evening with his wife by his side, and his child playing near-by in the long grass, when they looked up all three of them at the noise of a stormy vibration of wings, and saw a shape like a fiend settled upon a leaning arm of the mill, one great pinion – like the half-unfurled wing of a bird – drooping down behind him.

  The woman seized the screaming child and ran into the house, the miller hid his face in his hands, and presently after he heard again the pulsation of wings, and the fiend was departed. But he bade his wife (with a mad fierceness I should suppose) repeat nothing of what she had witnessed.

  And all the summer through, the lark yet singing in the sky, and flowers blowing, they remained in dread, alert to see again such a horrible shape. But although at night (brief enough, blessedly, for any dark labour in the summer months), they were at times troubled and dismayed by the mill set agoing, however calm the sunset may have left the air, yet they saw nothing again; and the miller was far too fearful to venture even on the lowermost step of his mill until the sun was a fair yard or more above the horizon.

  So the months rolled heavily on until as winter darkened the mill became more and more the haunt of a ‘devil’s great dark host’ (as he said), and you might hear them squalling and hooting past the window, and the whirring coveys of them in the air departing and returning.

  ‘But what did they grind?’ said I gently to ease the fellow. But at this instant the fire pierced into the very core of the mill and with a great crash and rumbling its chief stones fell headlong through the gaping floors. The smoke uplifted, a vast welter of sparks flew up, she stood outlined in fire, a marvellous bright beacon.

  But after this the miller would say no more, and seeing that the fire was waning, the frost again encroaching which had been thawed before, I pressed a guinea into the woman’s hand, whose little child now lay on her bosom fast asleep, poor little creature, and I descended to the hill on the other side.

  The darkness before me was painted with the variant flames and after some minutes walking I came on a knot of men and women, at the foot of the hill, who had watched that awful cresset from afar. It seems that a very general opinion was abroad in the countryside, of fear and horror of the mill. But since with such tales and rumours, the less the seed, the more wild and abandoned the flower (as it were the mustard-plant), very little trust can be put in such rustic hearsay.

  However, this is the story as received of the miller: I saw the mill afire myself. The sun rose in skies of gold and scarlet, and on glancing back I saw only a dark banner of smoke along the gloomy hills of the western horizon. Evidently the fire was now sunken low. And I never went that way again.

  * Time and Tide, 3 December 1955. Written in or before 1901.

  A:B:O.*

  I looked up over the top of my book at the portrait of my great-grandfather and listened in astonishment to the sudden peal of the bell, which clanged and clanged in straggling decisive strokes until, like a dog gone back to his kennel, it slowed, slackened and fell silent again. A bell has an unfriendly tongue; it is a router of wits, a messenger of alarms. Even in the quiet of twilight it may resemble a sour virago’s din. At a late hour, when the world is snug in night-cap and snoring is the only harmony, it is the devil’s own discordancy. I looked over my book at my placid ancestor, I say, and listened on even after the sound had been stilled.

  To tell the truth, I was more than inclined to pay no heed to the summons, and, secure in the kind warmth and solitude of my room, to ignore so rude a remembrancer of the world. Before I could decide either way, yet again the metal tongue clattered, as icily as a martinet. It pulled me to my feet. Then, my tranquillity, my inertia destroyed, it was useless and profitless to take no heed. I vowed vengeance. I would pounce sourly upon my visitor, thought I. I would send him back double-quick into the darkness of the night, and, if this were some timid feminine body (which God forefend), an antic and a grimace would effectually put such an one to route.

  I rose, opened the door, and slid cautiously in my slippers to the bolted door. There I paused to climb up on a chair in an endeavour to spy out on the late-comer from the fanlight, to take his size, to analyse his intentions, but standing there even on tiptoe I could see not so much as the crown of a hat. I clambered down and, after a dismal rattling of chain and shooting of bolts, flung open the door.

  Upon my top step (eight steps run down from the door to the garden and two more into the street) stood a little boy. A little boy with a ready tongue in his head, I perceived by the smirk at the corner of his mo
uth; a little boy of spirit too, for the knees of his knickerbockers were patched. This I perceived by the light of a lamp-post which stands over against the doctor’s house. Grimaces were wasted on this sturdy youngster in his red flannel neckerchief. I eyed him with pursed lips.

  ‘Mr Pelluther?’ said the little boy, his fists deep in the pockets of his jacket.

  ‘Who asks for Mr Pelluther?’ said I pedagogically.

  ‘Me,’ said the little boy.

  ‘What does me want with Mr Pelluther at so untoward an hour, eh, my little man? What the gracious do you mean by making clangour with my bell and waking the stars when all the world’s asleep, and fetching me out of the warmth to this windy doorstep? I have a mind to pull your ear.’

  Such sudden eloquence somewhat astonished the little boy. His ‘boyness’ seemed, I fancied, to leave him in the lurch; he was at school out of season; he retrogressed a few steps.

  ‘Please sir, I’ve got a letter for Mr Pelluther, the gentleman said,’ he turned his back on me, ‘but as he ain’t here I’ll take it back.’ He skipped down the step and at the bottom lustily set to whistling the Marseillaise.