Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Philip could contain himself no longer. The shower was over. The sun was out. The street outside now blazed with glory. Rapture had swept into the air, as if a myriad birds had been released over the metropolis and all London was in song. The empty cup at his elbow, the coloured tartlets on their dish, the gilded cupids dancing their garlands along the cornice of the low-pitched room, as if by the wand of an enchanter had suddenly consented to reveal a loveliness until then entirely hidden from view. But Londoners themselves are constricted, secretive folk – at least those of the West End. At sound of his laughter no fewer than three discreet young persons had raised their heads and glanced in sombre discomposure in his direction.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘if you would just stay here and give me a cheque … How long is your aunt staying in London?’

  ‘She goes to Paris – if she isn’t really comfortable – on the 20th of this month.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Philip repeated, and he took another breath, ‘say a few thousand pounds. These people are so dreadfully mercenary, and my own bank balance at the moment is all noughts. But there is my uncle’s, there was my uncle’s. She shall be comfortable. Oh, I vow it. Then when I come back – and that will be in no time – I could tell you how much more we shall want.’

  The young lady drew back into her chair, and poised herself there for an instant as if she were sitting to a Michael Angelo for her bust. ‘There now,’ she cried softly, ‘that’s what I call It. But my Aunt Chloe says, and she has a knowledge of the world, Mr Pim, which you wouldn’t think any possible world could endure for long unshaken – her view is that one should always be candid when one has anything pleasant to say. Which means, I reckon, that her Scots blood isn’t so crystal pure as once it was. And what I say is, looking at you just then, I didn’t guess you were a mathematician – not like that, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, but you see,’ Philip hastened to explain, ‘the few thousands I mentioned was only a guess – a little “something on account”, you know – and that of course, is only a quotation. Say three, or perhaps four, thousand. The total will, of course, be quantities more than that. I love shopping.’ He positively heard himself saying it, and trembled like a rock in an earthquake. ‘At least I used to.’

  ‘Well, it’s really only totals which seem much to interest my aunt. I should put another O on, don’t you think?’

  Philip’s blue eyes wavered for the flicker of a moment. For O stands not only for Ought, but for Obligation. He lowered his gentle head and drawing his fingers steadily along the edge of the little table as if he were describing a diagram incident to the higher ethics, he murmured, ‘You really do mean that your aunt wants a dreadfully complete, brand-new, expensive domicile, a slap-up British estancia, as supplied ready-made by a quite, of course, respectable firm of universal caterers? You see,’ he added lamely, ‘what some people are after is a home, and I don’t mean merely a brass knocker, a privet hedge and an aspidistra in the window. I mean – well, you know what I mean. I believe,’ he sighed, and his fingers desisted from their expedition, ‘I believe you know everything I mean. And to know all is to …’

  But the young American stranger was now too intent on practical matters to notice the cliché.

  ‘I am scrawling in thirty thousand,’ she said. ‘I do so love threes, though I’d almost put dollars. And I’ll leave you, Mr Pim, just to gather from out of that wonderful sagacity of yours what my aunt would mean by a home. And the name?’

  ‘Philip – P-h-i-1-i-p,’ Philip told her, ‘P-I-M.’

  ‘One “M”, and no “e” at the end of it!! Why that’s English all over. And “Philip” – I didn’t know that name sounded exactly like that before: “Philip Pim”.’

  Between her finger and thumb she held out the tiny document, and shook it in the air to make it dry.

  ‘Now how long shall I stay here, or might I, do you think, take a look at some of those cute little hats over the way until you come back? Honestly, Mr Pim, I do think you are perfectly and completely wonderful. And to trust a stranger like me, whom you have never so much as even seen a glimpse of until now! It’s – well, I really don’t know what it isn’t!’

  Philip rose. He felt, for the second time that day, as though his physical frame were composed of nothing more stable than calf’s foot jelly. But a fire once more burned in his brain. The spectral yet obese shape of Sir Leopold Bull had intruded itself.

  ‘I have left my watch on the piano,’ he said; ‘but I will be back here in less than an hour.’

  The young stranger glanced up at the little French clock on the café chimneypiece.

  ‘That will be exactly six minutes of five, then. And if you should lose the cheque you’ll find me in the hat-shop. And shan’t I be enjoying myself – expecting you. Oh, if only you knew the burden that is off my shoulders, and how, well, elevated I am, you would realize what a good Samaritan you are, and I’d say it even if it meant sending my gentle Aunt Chloe clean to Jericho.’

  Philip’s tapering fingers were hovering at that moment like a wounded bird over another slip of paper that lay face downwards on the table. It had been put there by the waitress. He assumed that young South-American ladies, like their English sisters, are accustomed to lunch on pâtisserie, but no table of weights and measures that he had neglected in his youth could have told him how many of such airy nothings usually go to a meal. Ten-and-a-penny – supposing! … He turned the slip over. He was safe.

  He was not only safe, but the next moment was striding down the street, his hat at its native tilt, his cane in his half-gloved hand, his heart elated as if on the wings of an eagle and yet wafted on its way with the tenderness of a dove.

  In the presence of the commissionaire and the chained-up lapdogs in their baskets in the entrance of the establishment from which he had but an hour or so ago escaped, he paused. Then he mounted the steps. Thrusting open the secretary’s door he found himself gazing once more at the bald pink cranium of his enemy. It was all he could see of him, and resembled the upper section of a roc’s egg intended as an ornament for the shelf of a Windsor Castle what-not.

  ‘I happened,’ he explained, ‘to have the leisure to look in again about the few little things I ordered this morning. I say this of course in confidence, but my uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim, is probably about to be – well, never mind, and it may be this may not all meet with his approval.’

  ‘That can be easily …’

  Philip raised a finger. ‘My uncle shares with me an objection to being informed by a mere official that his bank account is overdrawn, and that is its present state. Blood is thicker than water, Sir Leopold. And since I am unable, for the moment, to communicate with him, as he left by the midday train this afternoon for Scotland – for Thurso, to be precise – which, considering the rather confined area of the British Isles, entails, as you may be aware, a comparatively long journey, I am wearying myself with this tedious explanation only to ensure that my orders of this morning are charged to me. That being so, I should like to have this cheque – from an aunt as a matter of fact who has been staying in the Brazils – despatched at once to my Bankers. We have seventeen minutes before the clock strikes four, and as procrastination, Sir Leopold, is the thief of time, would you kindly summon an adequate messenger?’

  Philip had taken out his fountain pen and was now, in as firm a hand as he could manage, endorsing the slip of paper which he had just acquired and loathed parting with. He might never get another keepsake. ‘“Thirty thousand pounds”,’ he murmured under his breath, in case any eavesdropper might be vague about figures. ‘Now, what is the balance on the debit side, as I think you call it, of my uncle’s account?’

  Sir Leopold sat, pen on lip, his ‘reactions’ being nobody’s concern but his own. ‘It would take only a few minutes to make sure,’ he began; ‘indeed I have already dictated a letter to Colonel Pim.’

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ Philip reassured him. ‘Let it be de-dictated. It is just this. The charges
that have been recently made to my uncle – some of them I must confess on the extortionate side, and I am not including on the one side the golf ball, or the empty whisky jar on the other – are now mine. So long as that small point is clear we can easily arrange the details later. And I am assuming,’ he smoothed back his fair hair, ‘I am assuming with complete confidence that my orders will be fulfilled with absolute precision and punctuality.’ He cast a pensive glance at the ‘Chloe L. McAllister’ written in a delicately sloping calligraphy at the foot of the cheque. An hour ago he had been festering in spirit in the bowels of the New Bailey. He had emerged into the Garden of Eden. Such are the curious ways of this curious world. But, as Professor Einstein has discovered, there is little absolute difference between the ups and the downs of life. All is relative, even the manners of a Sir Leopold Bull. This gentleman pressed a bell-button, and got upon his feet.

  ‘I assure you, sir,’ he said with outspread palms, ‘nothing shall go amiss.’

  Though he detested chance physical contacts, Philip longed to punch his head. It would waste time, however, so he gently shut his eyes and withdrew. He withdrew to the nearest public telephone box. There he had a talk with the estate agents concerned with No.444 Grosvenor Square. On making sure of Colonel Crompton Pim’s name – and that took some little time – the junior partner was urbanity itself. And Philip having engaged himself to call upon him at eleven o’clock the following day, then and there secured – at a price – and until the end of September, this handsome residence, including, for neighbours, the Marquess of Montrose on the one side, and a superannuated Rear-Admiral on the other, with the option of retaining them, more or less indefinitely, after that date.

  ‘Quate, quate,’ he sighed into the little black funnel, and hung up the receiver. The deed was done. The crisis was over. The next would be due in rather less than twenty-four hours. A wry, almost infantile smile flitted over his pale pensive features at thought of it …

  ‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

  Never doubted clouds would break …’

  The martial words sounded out in his mind – on, on to –

  ‘No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time

  Greet the unseen with a cheer!…’

  but Philip didn’t stay at one cheer, he greeted it with three times three. ‘Work-time!’ – whatever its predecessors may have been, his last bright noonday could boast of being a bit of a bustle! Besides, he was young; it was the merry month of May, and even the air of London smelt so sweet and heady this sunny afternoon he could scarcely breathe. Instead, he sighed; yet at the same time continued to smile, and looked so odd in consequence he might have been mistaken for the model of a Young Poet of Our Time that had somehow escaped from Madame Tussaud’s.

  Still, time is time; and two-and-ninepence is two-and-ninepence. And not very much of that sum would be left with which to face the World when he had telegraphed to the somewhat French but wholly amiable widow of his Uncle Charles to ask for the advance of a fiver. His fingers still resting on the door-handle of the little telephone box – of about the same dimensions, he realized, as a cell at Bow Street – he hesitated. The future, so far as he could see beyond tomorrow, stretched out before him like the sands of the Sahara. The wondrous oasis at which he had arrived (and with a good deal of merchandise), that afternoon must after but one day’s sojourning prove only a mirage of the past. He remained lost in this sad reverie a moment, and then his absent glance fell upon a cat – a cat as jet-black as his hat, clearly ‘of English make throughout’, whisker-tip to tail, and by no means of earthenware. It had stepped up from out between the railings of an area opposite. Then it paused, and first it looked to the east and then it looked to the west, and then it advanced sedately into the street and straight in Philip’s direction. It was indeed a happy omen. Sufficient unto the day is the oasis thereof.

  With his heart where his brains ought to have been he breathed a blessing on Mr Bumbleton and hastened back to the tea-shop. He was exactly twelve minutes before his time. Tactfully refusing to intrude on his young stranger in her own wilds, he wheeled into a neighbouring square, and seating himself beneath a plane-tree, rapidly reviewed his morning’s expedition. Some young men might have been a little vain of a feat of foresight such as his. Philip merely thanked his lucky stars. However amply he conjured up the picture of the pied à terre which must be now vividly haunting the mind of Miss Chloe L. McAllister, he could think of nothing that had been omitted. He had ventured on a few superfluities; maybe four dozen ducky little harlequin toilet services, for example, might result in a ‘toothbrush-vase’ or a basin or two too many. He was something of a novice in kitchen implements, and fifty aluminium sets of saucepans of ten different dimensions had the very vulgar tang at the moment of an hotel. And it was hotels Miss McAllister couldn’t abide.

  Then again were the natives of Brazil as much addicted as their neighbours further north to indulging in the ‘canned’? He had forgotten how many score of score and gross of gross of tins and pots and glasses and jars and terrines of asparagus, truffles, mushrooms, foie-gras, caviare, coxcombs, olives, anchovies, alici picanti and Patum Peperium he had ventured on in the Provision Department (for Philip had frequently dined in Soho on hors d’oeuvres); or (for he had also a sweet tooth in his head), how many hundredweight of quince jelly and of wild strawberry and Morello cherry jam.

  His passion for soap and for wax candles (especially ‘long 1’s’, ‘long 12’s’ and ‘de luxe’) might have led him a little astray. But then soap improves with keeping and Miss McAllister would have to go to bed at least once, and maybe twice, before the wirers and the bulbers would have finished their operations at No.444; and being a lady of taste she might prefer a soft mellow gloom to an electric glare. His wine order, too, and of cherry brandy and liqueurs in particular, had been on the liberal side for the needs of a (perhaps temporarily) maiden lady, unless, maybe, the watershed of the Amazons was also a country of the dry? On the other hand she might have a liking – and now he fervently hoped so – for chutney, mangoes, mulligatawny paste, West India pickles, and even cheroots; and these provincial dainties he had entirely neglected. On principle.

  He left this little problem of plus and minus to solve itself, for his fancy had flitted away once more from Miss McAllister and was dizzying itself in the attempt to divine the look on the face of his young stranger when he threw open the portals of his estancia and ushered her into its splendours. But the effort filled him with an emotion so remote from mere domesticities and so quickened the beatings of his heart, quite apart from stirring in him a sudden positive hatred for a residence bigger than a thatched cottage in the country, of clay and wattles made, that he instantly leapt to his feet and strode out from under the dappling shadows of his plane-tree full into the sun.

  ‘She will understand; she will understand,’ he muttered to himself. But never in the whole of his life had Philip set up a ladder into heaven on so slender a foundation.

  ‘And you really really really prefer to walk?’ he was saying to her a few minutes afterwards. ‘Our taxis, you know, are not so bad; though I don’t suppose for speed and comfort they are a patch on Rio.’ His fingers were clutching meanwhile his last sixpence.

  ‘I really really really prefer to walk,’ Aunt Chloe’s niece assured him. ‘I just love this queer grimy old old romantic metropolis of yours, Mr Pim. And if you would take me home by the quiet little courts and lanes and byways and alleys and things, I’d adore every step.’

  Philip knew his London well; he could walk in it as the crow flies. It must then have been the unaccountable loss of this knowledge this afternoon that multiplied the number of ‘little courts and lanes and byways and alleys and things’, through which they took their solitary way. Some were quiet in their shadows and their sunshine, quiet with their sleek and cumbrous van-horses brooding over bulging nose-bags, cluppered up with straw and crates, or unbelievably blossoming with their maro
oned little shelving greengrocers’ shops and bright green gardens. In others the complete population (including manifest infants in arms) seemed to have collected on their doorsteps to see these two go by, and here the odour of last night’s fried fish and of this afternoon’s beer and sawdust enriched the air. But whether these two were alone or less alone it was all one in these labyrinths of rapture and delight. And the wondrous London sunset flared and faded, and they paid not the least outward heed to it, though that spirit within which is the tender and faithful guardian of the shrine called Memory was nonetheless busily stowing it away for them; perhaps for a rainy day.

  It thus came about that by a little before eight o’clock they had managed to cover the nine hundred yards which actually separated their tea-shop from Aunt Chloe’s niece’s friend’s house. And here they were. And Philip, a pace or two this side of its four white steps and its round green bay-trees, was now looking at that niece as if for the first and the last time. Warned by some shadow in his mind he glanced up, and perceived the two griffins that on either side of the doorway were thrusting down their Queen Anne wrought iron torch-extinguishers clean over their heads. At this omen he began to mistrust his black cat, his spirits sank into his shoes, he turned his face away, and shuddered.

  ‘What is it,’ he enquired sepulchrally, ‘that makes everything that is most real seem just like a dream. And oh how brief!’

  ‘What I should like to know,’ his companion replied emphatically, ‘is how you and I have come to talk about everything in the whole wide world except my Aunt Chloe’s new home. I simply can’t conjecture, Mr Pim. But the cunningest thing is that in spite of it everything is on all fours. We meet again tomorrow at four minutes past four at number four hundred and forty-four. And what is the name of the square?’