Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  As for the Noses of the Illustrious still living – Sam tried to be generous in his reflections on them, but often failed to be quite fair. Great noses, he found, were rarer even than great men. It may be argued that Nature has now no need to grow noses so noble as were those of old. Sam could hardly believe it.

  He had once in his young days visited with his father the Monkey-House in the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park. But one glance at its inmates had convinced him how far superior in shape and appearance is the human nose by comparison with that even of the larger apes – whom certain credulous persons suppose to have been our own ancestors. Even in those young days Sam had smiled at such a suggestion.

  ‘I’m glad, Dad,’ he had whispered, squeezing his father’s hand, ‘I’m glad, Dad, I haven’t a tail. Not all by myself, I mean.’ And Mr Such, noticing the sadness behind his smile, had at once taken him off to the Buns and the Bears.

  Monkey or no monkey, ape or no ape, the street noses of his own times, Sam thought, as seen at any rate from his window, were nothing very much to talk about, though many of them were uncommonly likeable. And to judge merely from their features, he could hardly suppose that all the famous living men whose photographs he saw in the newspapers were quite as remarkable as their admirers seemed to think. Try as he might to increase his store, Sam in fact had very few noses on his chimneypiece which had come into the world after Mr Gladstone’s had left it. But then, Sam was fastidious.

  Sam seldom ventured into the country on his nocturnal excursions: ‘By came a blackbird and snipped off her nose’ had been one of the favourite dandling rhymes of an early nurse of his. And though – fortunately for Sam – this bird is seldom abroad after nightfall, it was wiser not to stray into the wild. On the other hand, he knew every by-way, every green court and garden wall of his native town by heart. In one direction, however, he never strayed. There was a street named Lovers’ Walk which he avoided as he would have avoided a glass-blower’s furnace. For there lived his great-aunt Keren-Happuch.

  Not that he much thought of the cantankerous old woman now, or nursed any bitter grudge against her. After all, she had merely told his mother a secret which it might have hurt her a great deal more to discover for herself – or, worse still, to have had from the lips of a stranger. Still, the memory of that evening in his seventh year when with tears running down her cheeks his mother had broken the dreadful News, had never quite lost its sting. Nor could he recall without a pang that next unhappy morning when, after having experimented in the hot sunlight with Susan’s stub of tallow-candle, he had once and for all drawn down his nursery blinds and retired into his corner, with only his poor nose for company. No, it would be merely rubbing salt into an old wound to venture anywhere in the neighbourhood of his great-aunt Keren-Happuch.

  Thus Sam’s quiet uneventful life slipped away; so it might have continued to the end but for an unforeseen mischance. One Thursday evening – a 20th of October – he found himself treading a by-street into which he seldom turned, simply because it contained not a single bust-and-picture shop or bookseller’s. St Luke’s brief summer was over; the wind blew bleak over the cobbles, and the muffler under his old tall silk hat had pushed itself somewhat higher than usual over the bridge of Sam’s nose. He had paused a moment before the dingy window-panes of a marine store to gaze in upon a chipped cheap china bust of the poet Dante, and had smiled to himself in his pleasant fashion at sight of it. ‘Ah, Master,’ he whispered, ‘the little less and how much away,’ for the chip was where the face could least afford it – at the extreme tip of that astonishing nose.

  A sigh followed close after the smile, such a sigh as Jaques sighed in pity of the wounded stag by the wooded brook. Sam turned abruptly away from the fusty window, and then caught a glimpse over his muffler of a slim taut figure hastening along in the gloaming on the other side of the street – a figure birdlike, erect, with a patch over its left eye and the sleeve of the right arm pinned to its breast.

  Now there is a nose in history which no Englishman will ever forget: that of the Admiral of Trafalgar. A flame seemed to leap up in Sam’s bosom. Was this figure real or a ghost? Were his eyes deceiving him? Or was there indeed now stalking the streets of his native town in front of him one to whom his country could surely resort if ever danger once more threatened her shores? Sam burned with curiosity. There could be no hesitation: he must follow this stranger and make sure.

  Had the evening been warmer and his muffler in its usual position, he might have heard or seen his danger. But alas, heedless of all else, Sam at once stepped off the pavement into the street and started off in pursuit. At this precise moment an empty carrier’s van came careering at a foot-gallop out of the neighbouring alley – its horses elated by the lightness of their load and the prospect of their stables. There was a shout, a shuddering crash, a shower of dizzying sparks in Sam’s eyes, and he knew no more…

  When he came to, he found himself stretched out upon his mother’s horsehair sofa in his own neat sitting-room. He was muffled, chin to toes, in blankets and walled in with hot-water bottles; while his clammy countenance lay not more than two paces distant from an immense blazing fire! Sam had not been at close quarters with such a fire since his very earliest infancy. The sheer splendour of it fairly took his breath away. He lay transfixed, gazing into its flaming terraces and caves and grottoes in the wildest astonishment and horror.

  ‘Oh me! oh me!’ a voice sounded within him, as his dazzled eyeballs rolled up and away from this ill-boding sight and at once found themselves fixed on the face of a complete stranger. It was a face with an abrupt nose, a short brown beard, and quiet blue eyes which were gazing into his own with intense attention. ‘Oh me! oh me! A doctor!’ groaned Sam to himself. And Sam was right. He shut his eyes.

  ‘And how are we feeling now?’ enquired a quiet gruff voice.

  A pain racked Sam’s leg. His head was throbbing. But he gave little thought to either. His one concern was with the fire and with the middle of his own face. What was happening – what had happened – there? These were the two dreadful questions in his mind. What but one particular calamity could have fixed this stranger’s eyes in so engrossed a stare?

  ‘Am I ill? Am I dying?’ he muttered in a voice he scarcely recognized.

  ‘Nothing as serious as that, my dear sir,’ replied the doctor. ‘We just picked you up from under the van, and, finding your address on Messrs Bumpus’s envelope in one pocket and a latchkey in the other, we brought you home.’

  ‘Oh, doctor! my N—, my N—, my N—! Spare my N—!’ was Sam’s unintelligible reply.

  ‘Compose yourself, please,’ replied the doctor, for Sam seemed to be rambling. ‘There is nothing gravely wrong; nothing – I assure you. Merely a twisted ankle and slight concussion. Presently you may be sick. But at least you are no longer stone-cold.’

  With this he gently pushed up the sleeve of Sam’s black doeskin coat and took out his gold watch. Sam stared up into the eyes which no longer met his own. What had they seen? What was the mind behind them thinking about, apart from the feeble tick-tock, tick-a-tock which his shocked heart was beating out beneath his ribs?

  Stone-cold indeed! Sam’s body seemed to be on fire. Even if the grate had been empty, surely this internal heat alone must long since have converted that lofty peak in the middle of his face into a flat plateau. He was incapable of stirring, hand or foot. He lay mute and gasping, at the mercy of any tidings this stranger had to give.

  ‘Hm!’ the doctor snapped-to the lid of his watch, pushed down the sleeve of Sam’s coat and smiled. ‘It’s pumping along a little faster, now. That’s all to the good. What we need at present is complete rest and quiet. Just lie here, and enjoy the fire. Don’t worry; don’t even think. Presently your thoughts will begin to wander off of themselves, then just follow your nose and you’ll soon be safe in dreamland! Meanwhile, there is the basin; and not far off our excellent Mrs Hobbs is busy in the kitchen. She will come at once if you call
loud enough even to scare a mouse. I will look in again in the morning.’

  He cast one more steady look round Sam’s spotlessly neat parlour and yet another at the patient’s remarkable countenance.

  ‘I must apologize for having no ardent spirits in the house, Doctor,’ whispered Sam. ‘But won’t you please refresh yourself with a cup of Epps’s cocoa? The tin is on the dresser-shelf. It was, you know, only my N—, N—, my…’ but still the fateful word refused to pass Sam’s lips.

  A far-away smile was in the doctor’s glance. He gently pressed his patient’s hand, nodded good-night, and left the room. For five minutes – for three hundred enormous seconds – Sam lay on the sofa as inert as if he were an inanimate staring model in the basement of Madame Tussaud’s – as if he were wax all over, cap-à-pie. He then slipped into a profound childlike slumber.

  It was full daylight when he opened his eyes again. A stout homely body in a stiff print dress was bustling about the room. The fire burned as merrily as ever. And as if sleep had filled him with some secret elixir, Sam called out instantly in a loud bold voice: ‘Good morning, ma’am. Would you, please, kindly fetch me the hand-glass you will find on the dressing-table in the room above this.’

  ‘Of all the Peacocks!’ thought Mrs Hobbs to herself, but she at once hastened away to do his bidding.

  Sam lay transfixed, listening first to her ascending, and then to her descending, footsteps. His mind was made up. He had as a child faced one supreme disaster in his life; he would now at least as manfully face another. With trembling fingers he raised the hand-glass to his face, prepared for any shock.

  For any shock, that is, except that of finding his familiar feature absolutely unchanged. But so it was. The fire overnight had been fierce enough to roast an ox. His poor defenceless nose had lain there on the sofa in a direct line with its most furious glances maybe for an hour together. A slight flush on the bridge and tip suggested that it had been ever so slightly scorched. But otherwise it rose up in his face as lofty, as bony, as delicately arched, as formidable as ever. Wax indeed! hardly granite itself could have borne such an ordeal more triumphantly. Falsest of noses it had proved in sober truth – for it was real!

  Sam – though a timid – was at heart a brave man; but good news may be as hard to bear as bad, and he had suffered a severe shaking. He covered his brow with his hands and tried in vain to think calmly. What wonder? He had at that moment survived the second severest shock of his whole life. It was as if the gates of his prison house had been flung wide open and he had walked out into Freedom.

  Nosed like any other human being, he could now do all that can become a man. No more peeping from behind thick curtains, no more masked cooking, no more nocturnal skulking, no more overcoated shiverings on mornings of hard frost, no more fears, humiliations, precautions. All careers were now at his feet – ocean stoker, cannon-moulder, bell-founder, tea-planter, or even that of an equatorial buccaneer. Now, if he so wished – like Speke and Livingstone, Bates and Sven Hedin before him – he could explore the burning tropics; and summer in the wildest heats of the Sahara. He was free.

  In a day or two Sam was on his feet again, and seemingly not one whit the worse for his accident. What is more curious, he was at first conscious of little change in his mind or in himself. His relief, his gratitude had been inexpressible. And then, as time went on, and the novelty of having a nose which he might really call his own began to wane, his spirits flagged. At times he even pined for the ‘good old days’. He no longer seemed to fit his customary solitude. His old hobbies, even his books, even his Shakespeare, were no longer quite the same as of old. With the knowledge that he possessed a merely natural nose, it seemed that the noisy interfering world outside had drawn a good deal nearer.

  Talks with the doctor, a gossip now and then with homely Mrs Hobbs, earnest and husky confabulations with Mr Jones, had disturbed him far more than would have been possible if he had remained the old Sam of these long years past, or if even he had stayed the same old Sam but with his secret for ever obliterated and no nose at all to call his own. Even John Jones observed the change. ‘That Mr Such,’ he told his wife, ‘seems to have lost his interest even in sutt. He ain’t the man he were.’

  Sam indeed had begun to realize in what a backwater he had spent his days. How narrow were his pursuits; how peculiar his habits. He became depressed in mind. He lost his appetite. He was less and less inclined to chatter to himself, and to indulge in a fandango across the floor of his library. Not even the brave spouting of ‘To be or not to be’, or ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’, not even ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ could now rouse him to his former gaiety and ardour.

  For whatever his feelings towards his nose had been, it was as a nose of wax that he had all these years regarded it. As such he owed it his happy solitude, his hobbies, the serene tenor of his life – out of the glare and dust and heat of the bustling, giddy, world. Without his being aware of it, then, a deep affection had at last grown up in Sam for the very nose that might have been his ruin. He had been, indeed, his nose’s only friend. He had forgiven it everything. There was an understanding between them. They had been through storm and stress together, and in the last few years had found a calm, if outlandish, haven. Poor Sam, for days together he desisted even from shaving. How face a nose that told him only of wasted grief and shame, of lost opportunities.

  From his earliest days, too, Sam had believed that his nose was the only sham – the only piece of make-believe – in a world where everything else was real. Two homesick horses and a van had at a blow cruelly robbed him of this belief. And now, his trust and confidence in the one thing false having gone, doubts were beginning to arise in his mind regarding everything real.

  For some little time after his accident he simply could not get this absurd notion out of his mind. Though still by choice a nightbird, he now occasionally ventured on his walks abroad in the daylight, or rather in the latish afternoon. At such times he frequently found his eyes dwelling rather fixedly on other men’s faces. His own unassailable nasal organ rising like Ararat between his piercing eyes, he would discover himself in an omnibus or a railway carriage, his gaze rudely set – all but gloating on – some fellow-passenger’s nose. It was astonishing to find how seldom any such nose was unquestionable. Surely that old gentleman’s over there in the corner must be fictitious! Could Nature really have been responsible for this unshapely lump and that mere snub, and that and that!!

  Now Sam in his private life had never been accustomed to be rude and ill-mannered. When he talked to himself he talked as gentleman with gentleman. To realize then that he could be guilty of such conduct filled him with shame. And when detected in it, he would rapidly fix his eyes on some other object near by, or thrust his hand into the pocket of his frock-coat as if his stare had been absent-minded and he had suddenly discovered that his pocket-book had been stolen. Or he would cast upon his fellow-traveller the most ample and amiable of smiles and remark upon the weather. In spite of these precautions he more than once narrowly escaped a lasting injury to his own nose simply because of his intense interest in the noses of others.

  All this had two unhappy results. First, Sam began to look with suspicion on every nose he saw and then on their owners. Even the pleasing noses of the most charming of young ladies – when he found courage to glance at them – caused him the gravest misgivings. Why, he wondered, should so many of them attempt to conceal by means of a powder-puff a real nose, however minute, however pink, however glossy? The bloom, thought Sam, upon a nectarine, a cherry or a plum is proof positive in a fruiterer’s shop that his fruit is fresh and genuine. But powder? Sam wondered. But as time went on, these misgivings, these doubts vanished in their turn. Sam began to pity the noses to which he had been unkind. He began to learn that a good seaworthy honest ship, so to speak, has not necessarily been given an elegant figure-head. He grew sorry for folk with noses not a patch on his own in shape or seemliness, and rea
lized that to be really real in the world may be not only the hardest thing a man can attempt, but also the least flattering.

  By this time he had begun to acquire the reputation of being a little peculiar in his head, simply because of this habit of staring at noses, and then of looking aside with an almost audible click of his eyelids! Now that there was in sober fact nothing really odd about him at all, the whole of him had begun to appear a little fantastic.

  In part, too, from what was now a natural pride, in part because of his great muffler, Sam had a little way of dipping his own nose up and down while he walked – like a hen in the act of drinking. Or he would stand, like little Johnny-head-in-air, lost maybe in reflections on the works of Shakespeare, when he should have been leaving the pavement free for other pedestrians. One may do such things at dead of night and pass unobserved; but in broad day! Small boys in particular are sharp observers; and (however absurd their own half-shaped features may be) they make no allowances for the grown-up. So it came about that small boys were at last responsible for yet another crisis in Sam’s life.

  He had ventured out a good deal earlier than usual one cold sunny afternoon in December – two months after that momentous 20th of October. For, though direct daylight still tried his eyes, he felt it would hardly be fair to his nose nowadays not to accustom it to sunshine. For the same reason he now cooked not over a gas-stove but over a kitchener, and had laid in for roaring winter fires no less than three tons of best screened domestic coal from Cannock Chase, and a solid yard of ships’ logs.

  As, this particular morning, he made his way towards an outlying bookshop, a large wicker cage at an upper window took his eye. Squatting upon a perch in it, and surveying the street below, was a jackdaw – a bird as black and sleek of plumage as he was himself in garb. Sam had never before seen a bird with such a bill. He came to a standstill on the kerbstone, his eyes fastened on this interesting spectacle, and remained for so long in this oddish attitude for a gentleman in the street, that he attracted the attention of a fishmonger’s errand-boy.