Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘I took my place, well screened, commanding the path by which he would ascend, facing the last beams of the sun. The birds soon grew accustomed to me.

  ‘A greenfinch was singing in the leaves above me. I sat motionless, quite cold, almost numb. But my mind was clear; my heart beat untroubledly; a kind of hideous resignation filled my thoughts. But presently I forgot him. I was at last full of hope. I was thinking of her.

  ‘“At last!” I kept repeating, “Now we shall see. At last!” I said it aloud in a low calm voice, and then I heard the distant snapping of a twig. I counted slowly, nineteen, and he appeared twenty paces in front of me. He had been running and was still a little out of breath. I can but say I had no thought of turning back. I seemed only to be doing again what had been done already. I even analysed his face, its strength, its charm, its obstinacy and weakness. He looked ill and discontented, yet not, as it were, unhappy. I felt vaguely glad he did not look unhappy.

  ‘And then I covered his heart, called softly, as he came to where he could see me, his name. He stood quite still, his face perfectly calm in the sunlight, his eyes fixed motionless on mine. I heard the roar, smelt the smoke, and was kneeling on one knee beside him looking into the same face, the lids half-closed over the eyes.

  ‘I did not touch him, stared at him awhile, wondering guilelessly, as it were, what our quarrel had been; what was the matter now. I turned away with my gun, listened; turned back, listened at his mouth. But I did not touch him; I looked at his face with a kind of anguish; the odds between us now were so extreme. He would never now have the opportunity of defending himself, whatever one might say.

  ‘“O, yes! He’s dead,” I seemed to hear a voice saying. “He’s dead right enough. Don’t be alarmed. It is the end.” Yet I don’t think anything ever seemed quite so absurd to me as ever to have thought that this would be the end. But I felt no sorrow, no remorse; only disappointment, impotence. And then we met.

  ‘Her face – how can I describe it? Her hands stretched out to me in a last greeting – pity, horror, fear, hopelessness, but love – love. I only, I think, saw the love, then. I regretted nothing, not even the needlessness of what I had done – nothing. I only knew she still loved me and that we had indeed met.

  ‘She looked down behind me, and questioned me with her eyes. I nodded. I threw my gun into the bushes, and stood quite still, watching her face in the clear, heavenly twilight; in the green, unutterable loneliness. My lips shook, I could not speak. I held out my hands. She put hers, cold and thin as a ghost’s, in mine – “O, me too!” she said, nodding in an odd authoritative way, towards my body. I smiled and shook my head, as if refusing some trivial favour of long ago.

  ‘She looked at me, knew at once, understood at once. She sat down and hid her face in her hands and I sat down beside her, holding her hand and speaking to her. That was all. In the confusion and tumult as of the sea in the inner darkness of my mind shone steadily her love for me, my love for her. We did not speak of it. I knew that to speak definitely of it was to shatter for ever the peace and understanding we had. I no longer tried to wonder why she had left me, only knew deep in my heart that she had wished for me again, and that now we were at peace. Such are human things, seeming without reason, actions like leaves on a brook.

  ‘She came back with me to my hut. We did not speak of him; only momentary horror answered me from her eyes, when she was not aware. She fell asleep on my shoulder and cried, like a child, in her sleep. And then I persuaded her to go away. I told her lies; of how no one would inquire; of how in God’s sight I was but an instrument; told her that she was not to blame very much, that we go, and do, as Fate resolves. She listened to me, her beautiful eyes fixed on the distant, wooded hills. And we both knew talking was in vain. She will forgive me that I made a promise that I cannot keep. She will forgive me that I could not bring myself to have courage enough to live on.

  ‘I walked with her in the early dawn, through the marvellously shining fields, in a sunshine that poured as if from Paradise on wood and hill. We took hands, and kissed one another, at the last stile. I watched her go, watched her turn, disappear; saw her no more.’

  * Selected for inclusion in Beg (1955) but omitted at the galley-proof stage.

  Pig*

  It was the Fortieth Annual General Meeting of the S.S.C.P.P., and the hall was thronged. Its five lofty long glazed windows drenched at least three hundred attentive human faces with the low white light of a November mid-morning. Nor, happily, was there the least trace of fog; neither in the hall itself, nor in the address now in progress, nor in the audience. Ever and again a wan old Sol had fitfully peered in, timing his intrusions, it seemed, with the occasional sallies of applause. Possibly, he too in his celestial habitation was beginning to muse upon his luncheon, one no doubt, as Hamlet has suggested, of less fastidious a kind than that which now awaited the Members of the S.S.C.P.P.

  In ample morning coat and striped cashmere trousers Sir Andrew Campbell, their idolized Chairman, sat on the platform behind a somewhat insubstantial table draped with baize. A printed slip with a half-sheet of notepaper beneath a gilded pig on a small slab of granite was the only island in its sea of green, apart from a somewhat formidable ink-stand in silver. His chair, Tudor at least in design, afforded him plenty of space sideways, and he had himself secured the few inches middleways that were indispensable to his person. Claw-set pearl in cravat, his elbows rested on its arms, and his double chin on the wide white wings of his starched collar, he had been to the Society what its acorn was to an oak, its keystone is to an arch, its mainspring to a clock, its tail feathers to a swallow. Or rather he was in fact the Society, and now sat to all appearances as amply based and stable as St Michael’s Mount at high tide in the sheen of sunset.

  Meanwhile, his mind was at liberty, since in a large-sized registered envelope he had himself supplied all the relevant facts and figures which the Society’s distinguished guest, who had very kindly consented to address the meeting, was now decanting.

  His audience, thus favoured, fortunately preferred quantity to quality, and enjoyed, above everything, to be talked to about itself. With an excusable digression now and then, concerning himself, this was Lord Sounder’s present occupation. Sir Andrew, then, had been at liberty to subside into his usual vagrant reverie on these occasions.

  This morning’s was proving less serene than usual, although, as he sat there, his eyes fixed on or idly roving over the furthermost rows of chairs and their occupants, only an observer all but as close to him as his guardian angel could have detected anything amiss. Some minute mishap of mind or mood, a passing gloom was enshrouding momentarily his psyche, a weariness, a vague embarassment, an unexpressed or unexpressable desire for he knew not what. He felt restless, slightly elated, as slightly anxious, insecure, ill at ease.

  Time if not Nature had served him well. A face, of the general shape and size of John Silver’s, ‘like a ham’, had expanded proportionately to his general contours. Small green-grey eyes no less active than alert looked out of it on either side of a large somewhat shapeless nose. Age had at last silvered the bristling hair at his temples, but not the clipped moustache that graced the upper lip of his small full mouth. It was a placid visage in repose. A faint haze of detachment had now gathered over it. He had floated off into the distant past. He was musing on his beginnings, on his youth. Whatever age he might look to outward view, say sixty-three, he was now sweet seventeen again in inward semblance. But as he mused, yet again, stealthy, seductive as the spice-laden breezes of Cythera, there wisped beneath his nostrils an odour – the odour of bacon-rashers frying in the pan. His cheek paled then purpled, he beckoned secretly but violently to a minor employee fortunately standing under the nearest window. And with an airy waft of his hand bade him shut the window above his head.

  He was once more back in the past again. No longer an office boy but a junior clerk. It was a Tuesday morning, and on the stool beside him, opposite the window they shared,
sat Jimmie Cadmer, who had succeeded him in the office he had lately vacated.

  Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, narrow-faced – as were also his exquisite eyebrows arching his dark eyes as large and liquid as a gazelle’s. At this moment, in that distant past, and punctual as ever, a faint bawling, squeeching and grunting had made itself audible from the gates beyond the yard. Jimmie who had been vainly endeavouring to mend a cross-nibbed pen, and re-inking his long bony fingers in the process, at once stopped to listen. Andy more sluggishly had followed suit.

  Their window overlooked a fenced-in asphalted alley some two or three yards wide. They sat still, and watched. Apart perhaps from Pig-Hour itself, the most dramatic and stirring event of the working week was about to begin. Grunts, yells, squawks and squealings drew nearer, and in a moment the vanguard of a numerous posse of pigs, a trotting tumbling little multitude at least two or three dozen strong, appeared on the scene. They were part and parcel of the weekly supply of the Universal Sorbeau Sausage Company, and so far as they were concerned it was the spectre of death, grisly bones and grin complete, that straddled the fence opposite the boys’ window.

  Andy, such is the hardening outcome of custom, penholder resting on his lower lip, was surveying them cold and empty-eyed this bright fine morning. Every Tuesday during the last two years he had witnessed this moving and dramatic little spectacle; but being possessed of brains and sentiments which were somewhat slow in action, he had not yet even decided whether the alert, clean-lined, pawky, good-humoured, active little animals were even vaguely aware of what in the course of the next dark hour was in store for them. It had not at any time even occurred to him to speculate whether suicide, self-sacrifice, euthanasia, ever took place among the lower animals, but if pressed even at that early age he might have agreed that whatever mundane benefits might result to others by a sudden self-inflicted exit, they preferred life to death.

  The foremost pig of the trotting throng was by this time out of sight, propelled possibly in his head-long career by those behind him rather than by any will of his own. On came the remainder of the multitude, until at last only a few stragglers preceded the two blue-linen-overalled janitors who were in charge of the drove, and who came into view. One of these stragglers, a pale, wiry, rather elongated little personage, conveying a suggestion of unusual presence of mind, suddenly paused, came to a standstill, turned his three-cornered head, and for the space of a few immense moments fixed its minute green-grey eyes on the window glass – if not actually on Andy himself, who sat beyond it. To Andy this confrontation somehow appeared to be intentional, even purposeful – a gaze, inquiring, piercing, pleading, in vocative, and of a shattering sorrowfulness that went straight to his somewhat lymphatic heart. Never before had he thought of these weekly victims of the Universal Sorbeau Sausage Company – such was the somewhat arrogant designation of the firm in which he was employed – as a collection of unique individuals. Hitherto they had merely been a little doomed mob of animated pork, on which incidentally he relied for his daily bread wholly apart from bacon.

  A thin perceptible flush had spread over his pale cheek. He was by nature of a bilious humour, intermingled with the sanguine and phlegmatic. Once moved he was wholly moved. That brief exchange of glances – lad with pig – had acted on him instantaneously. It was a challenge, a mute overwhelming appeal. At that time he had not heard of the oriental belief in the transmigration of souls. Nevertheless, if that of a great-great aunt or uncle had actually been resident behind those tiny greenish windows, this one tragic interchange of glances could not have had a more radical or enduring effect. Probably a less.

  The procession was over, nothing remained of it except the dwelling odour of passing pig, and at intervals throughout the rest of the morning distant, plangent, prolonged yells. Which of these, if any, he speculated, was being addressed perhaps, but utterly in vain, to himself?

  A quarter of an hour before his usual lunch-time, which he shared with his friend Jimmie Cadmer, when funds were low – a few sandwiches, a hunk of bread and cheese, and an occasional Sorbeau sausage, though it was not provided by the firm – and which on a fine day they partook of under the fence overlooking the green fields beyond the factory – a quarter of an hour before lunch-time he laid down his pen and remarked very slowly and with extreme difficulty, ‘It’s pretty beastly, Jimmie, all those pigs.’

  All Jimmie’s movements were abrupt. He jerked round his dark narrow head and shoulders, fixing his gazelle-dark luminous eyes on his friend’s face – eyes in which, like the shadow of a granite crag on a mountain pool, all the sorrows of the world seemed to be lying concealed, and replied, ‘When their thoats are slit and the blood’s come, they are scalded and scraped … And then I suppose,’ he added pensively, ‘they’re pork.’ A longer pause followed: ‘I wonder if they think.’

  Andy allowed this bitter comment to sink in.

  ‘Yes,’ he added at last. ‘What else can they do when they’re not doing anything else. But I meant, meeself, principally what becomes of them.’

  ‘I’ve always heard,’ said Jimmie, ‘they are the best and tastiest sausages on the market, and I suppose they wouldn’t say that in the ads if there wasn’t any truth in it. I suppose not. It wouldn’t be legal. Though I shouldn’t be surprised if gristle is added, and if the bread is sometimes mouldy. At least my mother thinks it’s bread.’

  Andy pondered. ‘Haven’t you ever even been in “the House”, then?’ he inquired. ‘Those just now aren’t the only pigs. The others come in the evening, or after dark, or anyhow round by the back alley, real old hogs, full-sized some of them, and old sows almost as hairy as hyaenas. I have seen them myself. They know where they are going to all right … And you have never even been into “the House”!’

  The deep, liquid, tragic eyes gazed softly back, and it was now Jimmie’s turn to flush. He shook his head. ‘I have never wanted to,’ he confessed. ‘I did know. But I can’t stick blood. Nor can my mother. When I was a nipper eight years old I fainted even when I cut my thumb – the basin and the bandage. I went all of a swirl … I don’t know. Things like that just come up, and you are gone before you know it. Is that what you meant by “beastly”?’

  Andy’s realization that from infancy upwards he had been of a far less sensitive temperament, though it had opened his eyes a little, only strengthened his position. He too abstracted from his pocket a grubby handkerchief and blew his nose.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he agreed. ‘The blood too. But not only that.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s the poor little devils themselves. Even if they are only pigs, they are alive.’ A distant grievous and infantine squeal, so faint to the ear that it might almost have been said to have descended on them from out of the blue, had emphasized his remark. ‘Or at least,’ he added pensively, ‘they were. And – though of course it may sound pretty silly – one looked at me just now.’

  ‘One of them? … At you?’ whispered Jimmie.

  Andy turned his solemn pink-and-pallid-chapped face and glinting eyes full in the direction of his younger colleague, as if to bear witness to his sobriety. ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘at me. And I shan’t forget it needier.’

  A forlorn screech from the hooter of the factory here announced it was one o’clock. During the lunch hour they shared together the two boys continued to discuss this little problem, until it veered off into a more familiar one, that of Andy’s salary.

  On his fourteenth birthday his Aunt Clara – he was an orphan – had taken him to see the Manager, and it was agreed that he should begin his duties as office boy at a salary of eight shillings and sixpence a week. It wasn’t a princely arrangement; and Sir Andrew Campbell, up in his chair on the platform, had actually smiled to himself at remembrance of this occasion. These scenes of his distant past moreover were slipping through the minute eyepiece of Memory far more vividly and rapidly than can the slides of a magic lantern. After his first year of honest if rather sluggish progress his salary had been raised by eighteen pence – all but
a sheer 20 per cent. A year after that Jimmie had succeeded to his office; but although Andy had for some six months past been a junior clerk, nothing had yet rewarded him out of the Manager’s mouth but a promise to think the little matter over. This ill-merited treatment had been steadily festering in Andy’s mind.

  Munching their apples and sandwiches of bread-and-cheese, the two friends had again and again discussed it, and to very little purpose. They were discussing it now, but in the light of the events of the morning, the situation was more complicated. Hitherto Andy’s grievance had been merely financial. It affected his sense of justice and of his own worth and dignity. He had never objected either to his connection with the ‘Sorbeau Young Pig Sausage Company’ – which in smaller type was followed in their manifesto by Save the young, you save the old also. Now, even in those very early days, Conscience or at least a sort of fellow-feeling was having a say in the matter. He had flung away the minute remnant of his apple core into the hedge and had declared his determination to confront the Manager with an ultimatum. Some day.

  That evening, after tea – this heart-to-heart talk forgotten for the time being – he had hastened upstairs to freshen himself up before faring out again to a little musical reunion at the local Sunday School. The small square of cracked looking-glass before which he stood brushing his hair, beneath the fan-shaped gas-jet over his chest of drawers, was far from flattering, but as he stood before it, stubbornly endeavouring to persuade the customary flaxen coxcomb of hair above his right eyebrow into its usual curve, it seemed suddenly as if by a positive piece of magic an entirely different face was surveying him from its dingy recesses. The effect was little short of an hallucination.

  Amalgamated, composite, as it were, with his own familiar face, the small lap-eared, triangular visage of a pig was peering at him out of this faint vitreous fog. Nor was it merely that of a small pig. He had recognized it. It was his pig. It was the pig with whom he had exchanged secrets that very morning. For a few crucial moments he continued to gaze. And then, like Alice’s vision of the Cheshire Cat, the image faded. Here was Andy again, the Andy, the whole Andy, and nothing but Andy. Still, its effect remained. It was to influence his complete career.