Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  The aged head was nodding – as if with fatigue. The cramped fingers fumbled aimlessly with the lace handkerchief, and Alice’s poor wits were once more in a desperate confusion. The room swam dizzily before her eyes. She shut them a moment; endeavouring in vain to consider calmly what that remote unhuman voice had been saying to her. She might as well have struggled in sleep to shake off the veils and nets of a dream, the snares of a nightmare. One thing only was audible to her now, a bird singing in the garden and the sound of her shoe tapping on the floor. She listened – and came back.

  ‘You mean,’ she whispered, ‘on and on and on – like you, great-grandmamma?’

  The old lady made no reply.

  ‘May I, do you think, then, if you would be so kind, may I have time to think it over?’

  ‘Think what over?’ said her godmother. ‘Are you supposing a child of your age can think over three complete centuries before a single moment of them has come into view?’

  ‘No,’ said Alice, her courage returning a little, ‘I meant, think over what you have said. It is so very difficult to realize what it means.’

  ‘It means,’ said the old lady, ‘an immeasurable sea, infinite space, an endless vista – of time. It means freedom from the cares and anxieties and follies that are the lot of the poor creatures in the world beyond – living out their few days in brutish stupidity. You are still young, but who knows? It means, my child, postponing a visit to a certain old friend of ours – whose name is Death.’

  She breathed the word as if in begrudged pleasure at its sound. Alice shuddered, and yet it gave her fresh resolution. She rose from her chair.

  ‘I am young and stupid, I know, great-grandmamma; and I would do anything in the world not to – not to hurt your feelings. And of course, of course I know that most people have a very hard time and that most of us are not very sharp-witted. But you said death; and I think, if you will forgive my saying so, I would rather I should have to die when – just when, I mean, I must die. You see, it would be a very sorrowful thing for me if it came after my mother had – if, I mean, she cannot share the secret too? And even then … Why cannot we all share it? I do see, indeed I do, there is very little time in this world in which to grow wise. But when you think of the men who have——’

  ‘You are here, my child,’ Miss Cheyney interrupted her, ‘to answer questions – not to ask them. I must not be fatigued. Then I should have no sleep. But surely you are old enough to know that there is not a human creature in a thousand, nay, not one in a hundred thousand, who has any hope of growing wise, not if he lived till Doomsday.’

  She edged forward an inch in her chair. ‘Suppose, my child, your refusal means that this secret will perish with – with me? Unless,’ the voice sank to a muttering, ‘unless you consent to share it? Eh, what then?’

  Alice found her eyes fixed on the old lady like a bird’s on a serpent, and the only answer she could make was a violent shake of the head. ‘Oh,’ she cried, suddenly bursting into tears, ‘I simply can’t tell you how grateful I am for all your kindness, and how miserable I seem to myself to be saying this. But please, Miss Cheyney, may I go now? I feel a dreadful thing might happen if I stay here a minute longer.’

  The old lady seemed to be struggling in her chair, as if in the effort to rise out of it; but her strength failed her. She lifted her claw-like mittened hand into the air.

  ‘Begone at once, then,’ she whispered, ‘at once. Even my patience is limited. And when the day comes that will remind you of my kindness, may you wish you had … Oh, oh! …’ The frail voice rose shrill as a gnat’s, then ceased. At sound of it the old butler came hastening in at the further door; and Alice slipped out of the other …

  Not until the house had vanished from sight behind the leaping branches of its forest-trees did she slacken her pace to recover her breath. She had run wildly on, not daring to pause or even glance over her shoulder, as if her guardian angel were at her heels, lending wings to her feet to save her from danger.

  That evening she and her mother – seated in the cosy red-curtained coffee-room of the Red Lion – actually sipped together a brimming glass of the landlord’s old Madeira. Alice had never before kept any secret from her mother. Yet though she was able to tell her most of what had happened that afternoon, she could not persuade herself to utter a syllable about the purpose which had prompted Miss Cheyney to send her so improbable an invitation. Not then, nor ever afterwards.

  ‘Do you really mean, my own dearest,’ her mother repeated more than once, pressing her hand as they sat in the chill spring night under the old oil-lamp-post awaiting their train in the little country railway station; ‘do you mean she never gave you a single little keepsake; never offered you anything out of all those wonderful treasures in that dreadful old house?’

  ‘She asked me, mother dear,’ said Alice, turning her face away towards the dark-mouthed tunnel through which they would soon be venturing – ‘she asked me if I would like ever to be as old as she was. And honestly, I said I would much prefer to stay just the silly green creature I am, so long as I can be with you.’

  It was an odd thing to do – if the station-master had been watching them – but, however odd, it is certainly true that at this moment mother and daughter turned and flung their arms about each other’s necks and kissed each other in such a transport as if they had met again for the first time after an enormous journey.

  Not that Alice had been quite accurate in saying that her godmother had made her no gift. For a day or two afterwards there came by post a package; and enwrapped in its folds of old Chinese paper Alice found the very portrait she had seen on the wall on that already seemingly far-off day – the drawing, I mean, made by a pupil of the famous Hans Holbein, depicting her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in the year of grace 1564, when she was just turned seventeen.

  * As printed in CSC (1947).

  Maria-Fly*

  Little Maria that morning – and this is a good many years ago now – was dressed in a black and white frock with a flounce to it. Her hair was tied back over her small ears with a white ribbon, and she was sitting in the drawing-room on a low armchair with a blue-cushioned seat; her stockinged legs dangling down in front of her. She was all by herself. She had wandered in there – nobody by; and after walking about for a little while looking at the things in the room, and sniffing at a bowl of red damask roses, she had sat down, looking so sleek and demure you might almost have supposed that company was present and she was ‘behaving’.

  But she was not; she was only thinking. It was a quiet morning. The room, with its two square-paned bow windows, was rather long. There was sunshine in it, and it was still, and though, as it appeared, there was no other living thing between its walls except herself, it seemed to be happy too. And Maria had begun to think – or rather not exactly to think and not exactly to dream, but (if that is possible) to do both together; though she could not have told anyone what she was thinking and dreaming about.

  She had had a bowl of bread and milk for breakfast, half an apple, and two slices of bread-and-jam. She felt comfortable. Her piano practice in the old room by the nursery was over, and now she was alone. But she was alone more than usual. It was as if she were not only sitting there in her blue-cushioned armchair with her legs dangling down, but that she could see herself sitting there. It startled her a little when that notion occurred to her. It was almost as if at that moment she must have really slipped into a dream. And she glanced up quickly with her rather round face and clear, darting eyes to make sure. And on the white paint at the side of the door, not very far away, she saw a fly.

  It was just a fly. But simply because at that moment everything was so quiet in the world, and because, maybe, unlike the chairs and tables around her, it was alive, Maria fixed her eyes on the fly. It was nevertheless a perfectly ordinary fly – a housefly. It stood there alone on its six brushy legs and clawed feet, their small, nimble pads adhering to the white gloss of
the paint. But, though ordinary, it was conspicuous – just in the same way as a man in black clothes with immense boots and a high cap on the enormous dazzling snow-slopes of a mountain is conspicuous – and Maria seemed to be seeing the fly much more clearly and minutely than you would have supposed possible, considering the distance between herself and it.

  On the other hand, the fly was not standing there doing nothing, as Maria was sitting there doing nothing. It was not, for example, merely standing on the paint in its drawing-room and looking across at another fly infinitely tinier on the white paint of the minute door to that drawing-room. It was busy as flies usually are in the warm, sunny months.

  Maria had been up and had dressed herself hours and hours ago; but flies seem to be dressing, or at least to be toileting and titivating themselves all the time when they are not prowling about on a table in search of food, or roving about, or sucking up water, or standing like mock flies asleep, or angling to and fro in the air under a chandelier or a fly-charm in one another’s company.

  Not that Maria was by any means fond of flies. She shooed them away with her spoon when they came buzzing about over her blancmange or red-currant-and-raspberry tart, or alighted on her bare arms, or walked rapidly about over her bedclothes. Once she had pulled off the wings of a fly, and had never forgotten how suffocatingly fusty and hot she had felt after doing so.

  And if there was one thing Maria couldn’t abide, it was a fly floating in her bath. It was extraordinary that though its carcass was such a minute thing you could at such a moment see absolutely nothing else. It was extraordinary that the whole of the water at such a moment seemed like fly-water.

  She would ask her nurse to take the ill-happed creature’s corpse out of the bath and put it on the window-sill in case it was not quite dead and might come-to again.

  And if she remembered to look next morning, maybe it was not, or maybe it was, there still – just its body. She had more than once, too, heard the dismal languishing drone a fly utters when it has been decoyed into a web and sees the spider come sallying out of its round, silken lair in the corner. It had filled her with horror and hatred and a miserable pity. Yet it had not made her any fonder of flies just for their own sakes alone. But then, one doesn’t always feel exactly the same about anything. It depends on where you are, and what kind of mood you are in, and where the other thing is, and what kind of mood that is in.

  So it was this morning. For some reason, this particular fly was different; and Maria sat watching it with the closest attention. It seemed to be that just as Maria herself was one particular little girl, so this was one particular fly. A fly by itself. A fly living its own one life; confident, alert, alone in its own Fly World.

  To judge from its solitude, and the easy, careless, busy way in which it was spending its time, it might be supposed indeed that it had the whole universe to itself. It might be supposed it was Sirius – and not another star in the sky. And after a while, so intent did Maria become that she seemed to be doing a great deal more than merely watching the fly. She became engrossed.

  She was now stooping together in her chair almost as if she were a pincushion and her eyes were black-headed pins in it. She seemed almost to have become the fly – Maria-Fly. If it is possible, that is, she had become two things at once, or one thing at twice. It was an odd experience – and it lasted at least three minutes by the little gold clock, with the gilt goggling fish on either side its dial under the glass-case on the chimneypiece. Three minutes, that is, of ordinary clock-time.

  For when Maria herself came-to, it seemed she had been away for at least three centuries – as if, like the stranger in the rhyme, she had been with her candle all the way to Babylon; aye, and back again: as if she had gone away Maria, come back Maria-Fly and now was just Maria again. But yet, when she came-to, everything was a little different.

  She could not possibly have explained why, but she felt surprisingly gay and joyful. It was as if a voice, sweet and shrill as the angel Israfel’s, had been singing in her mind from a very long way off. She looked about her in sheer astonishment. If anything, the things in the room were stiller than ever, and yet she would almost have supposed that up to a moment ago they had been alive and watching her, and were now merely pretending to be not-alive again.

  She looked at the roses in the bowl: they were floating there filled with their fragrance and beauty as a dew-drop is with light. The fishes on either side the little clock seemed to be made of flames rather than gilded plaster. There was a patch of sunshine, too – just an oblong patch resting on the carpet and part of a chair. It seemed to be lovelier than words could tell and to be resting there as if in adoration of its own beauty. Maria saw all this with her young eyes, and could not realize what had happened to her. She was glad she was alone. She had never felt like it before. It was as if she had ceased to be herself altogether in her black and white frock and had become just a tied-up parcel marked ‘Pure Happiness’, with the date on it.

  And as she gradually became aware how very still the room was, almost stealthy – and all quiet things, of course, seem in a way a little watchful – she felt she must go out of it. She felt she must go out of it at once. So she scrambled down off her chair. On purpose, she didn’t even glance again at her friend the fly. She most particularly (though she didn’t know why) wished not to see it again. So she walked sidelong a little, her head turned to one side, so that no part of her eye should see the fly again even by accident.

  She went out of the room, walked along down the hall, and went down the rather dark side-stairs into the kitchen. There was a fire burning in the great burnished range. A green tree showed at the window, and a glass jar half-full of beer and wasps was twinkling on its sill. Mrs Poulton, the cook, was rolling a piece of dough on her pastry-or dough-board, with an apron tied with all its tape round her waist. There was an immense flour dredger like a pepper-pot beside the board, and a hare, its fur soft as wool, cinnamon and snow-white, lay at the farther end of the table. Its long white teeth gleamed like ivory between its parted lips.

  ‘Mrs Poulton,’ Maria said, ‘I have seen a fly.’

  ‘Now, have you?’ said the cook. And the ‘have’ was like a valley or a meadow that slopes up and down with wild flowers all over it. ‘And did the fly see you?’

  That hadn’t occurred to Maria. She frowned a little. ‘It’s got lots of kind of eyes, you know,’ she said. ‘But what I mean is, I sawn it.’

  ‘And that was a queer thing, too,’ said cook, deftly lifting up the dough and arranging its limp folds over the fat, dark, sugary plums in the shallow pie-dish, with an inverted egg-cup in the middle. She gave a look at it; and then took up her kitchen knife and, deft as a barber, whipped the knife clean round the edge of the dish to cut away what dough hung over. ‘Would you like a dolly, dear?’ she said.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Maria, a little primly, not wishing to have the subject changed. ‘I have told you about the fly,’ she repeated, ‘and you don’t seem to take a bit of notice of it.’

  The cook lifted her doughy knife, turned her round face and looked at the little girl. She had small, lively, light blue eyes and the hair under her cap was as fair and light in colour as new straw. It was a plump face, and yet sharp. ‘And what do you mean by that, may I ask?’ she said, eyeing Maria.

  ‘I mean,’ said Maria stubbornly, ‘I sawn a fly. It was on the paint of the door of the droring-room, and it was all by itself.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’ said Mrs Poulton, trying to think of something else to say.

  ‘I said,’ said Maria, ‘on the door.’

  ‘Yes; but whereabouts on the door?’ persisted the cook.

  ‘On the side where it’s cut in and the other part comes.’

  ‘Oh, on the jamb,’ said Mrs Poulton.

  ‘Jam!’ said Maria. ‘How could there be jam on the door?’

  ‘Well, I’m not so sure about that, Miss Sticky-fingers,’ said the cook. ‘But by jamb I meant door-jamb, though it�
�s spelt different – leastwise, I think so. And what was the fly doing? – nasty creatures.’

  Maria looked at her. ‘That’s what everybody says,’ she said. ‘My fly – wasn’t doing anything.’ This was not exactly the truth; and feeling a little uneasy about it, Maria remarked in a little voice, ‘But I am going now, thank you.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the cook. ‘And be sure and mind them steep stairs, my precious.’

  Maria glanced at the wasps hovering over the bottle, she glanced at Mrs Poulton, at the fire in the range, at the dish-covers on the walls – and then she went out of the door.

  She minded the steep kitchen stairs just as much as usual, though she was a little indignant after her talk with the cook. When she reached the top of them, she went on along the slippery hall, past the grandfather’s clock, with the white moon’s-face in the blue over its hands, past the table with the pink-flowering pelargonium on it, and climbed on up the wide, shallow staircase, taking hold of the balusters one by one, but treading as near as possible in the middle of the soft, rose-patterned stair carpet.