Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  And when she got to the top she came to a room where she knew she would find a guest who was staying in the house. His name was Mr Kittleson; he was a clergyman, and this Saturday morning he was writing his sermon for Sunday, and his text was ‘Consider the lilies of the field…They toil not neither do they spin’.

  After fumbling with the handle a little Maria pushed the door open and looked in. And there sat the old gentleman in a round leather chair, with his silvery-grey beard spreading down over his chest, his sermon-paper on the blotting book in front of him, and a brass inkstand beyond that. His lips were moving as he wrote. But on hearing the door open he stayed his writing, and with stooping head looked round over his gold spectacles at Maria.

  ‘Well, well, my dear, this is a very pleasant sight, and what can I do for you?’ he said, being one of those peculiar old gentlemen who don’t mind being interrupted even when they are writing sermons.

  ‘I,’ said Maria, edging a little into the room, ‘I have just seen a fly! It was standing all by itself on the – the jamb of the door in the droring-room.’

  ‘In the drawing-room? Indeed!’ said the old gentleman, still peering over his gold spectacles. ‘And a very fortunate fly it was, to be in your company, my dear. And how very kind of you to come and tell me.’

  Maria was almost as little pleased by the old gentleman’s politeness as she had been with her talk with the cook. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but this was not a norinary fly. It was all by itself, and I looked at it.’

  The old gentleman peeped down a little absently at his clear, sloping handwriting on the paper. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘But then, my dear little Maria, no fly is really ordinary. They are remarkable creatures if you look at them attentively. And especially through a microscope. What does the Book say: “fearfully and wonderfully made”? They have what is called a proboscis – trunks, you know, just like elephants. And they can walk upside down. Eh? How about that?’

  At that moment, out of its shadowy lair a silvery clothes-moth came flitting across the sunlight over his table. The old gentleman threw up his hands at it, but it wavered, soared, and escaped out of his clutches.

  ‘Cook says flies are nasty creatures,’ said Maria.

  ‘Ah,’ said the old clergyman, ‘and I’ve no doubt cook avoids them in our food. But they have their ways, which may not please us, just as we have our ways, which may not please somebody else. But even a fly, my dear, enjoys its own small life and does what it is intended to do in it. “Little busy, thirsty fly”,’ he began, but Maria, who was looking at him as attentively as she had looked at the insect itself (before, that is, it had actually become a Maria-Fly), at once interrupted him. ‘It’s a beautiful rhyme,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘I know it very well, thank you. But that was all I wanted to say. Just that I had sawn it – seen it. I don’t think I could tell you anything else – so, I mean, that it would be ’xplained to you.’

  The old gentleman, pen in hand, continued to smile at his visitor over his beard in the same bland cautious way he always did, until she had slid round the door out of his sight, and had firmly closed it after her.

  On her way back along the corridor Maria passed the door of the workroom; it was ajar, and she peeped in. Miss Salmon, in her black stuff dress, sat there beside a table on which stood a sewing-machine. At this moment she was at work with her needle. She always smelt fresh, but a little faint; though also of camphor. She had an immensely long white face – high forehead and pointed chin – with rather protruding eyes and elbows; and she and Maria were old friends.

  ‘And what can I do for you, madam, this morning?’ she cried in a deep voice like a man’s.

  ‘Well, I just looked in, madam, to tell you I seen a fly.’

  ‘If you was to look through the eye of the smallest needle in that workbasket you would see the gates of Paradise,’ said Miss Salmon, stitching away again with a click that sounded almost as loud as if a carpenter were at work in the room.

  ‘Give it me,’ said Maria.

  ‘Ah ha!’ cried Miss Salmon, ‘such things need looking for.’

  ‘Ah ha!’ chirped Maria, ‘and that means tidying all the basket up.’

  ‘Nothing seek, nothing find,’ cried Miss Salmon, ‘as the cat said to the stickleback, which is far better than Latin, madam. And what, may I ask, was the name of Mr Jasper Fly Esquire? If you would kindly ask the gentleman to step this way I will make him a paper house with bars to it, and we’ll feed him on strawberries and cream.’

  Maria’s spirits seemed to sink into her shoes. ‘It was not that kind of fly at all,’ she said, ‘and – and I don’t wish to tell you the name, thank you very much.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Miss Salmon lifting her needle and opening wide her eyes, ‘and don’t forget closing time’s at seven.’

  It was strange that Maria should feel so dismal at this turn of the conversation, considering that she and Miss Salmon were such very old friends and always had their little bit of fun together. Maria looked at her sitting bolt upright there in her high-collared black stuff dress, with her high head.

  ‘Good morning, madam,’ said Miss Salmon.

  And Maria withdrew.

  Opposite the workroom there was a portrait hanging on the landing in a large gilt frame. Maria looked at the lady painted in it, in her queer clothes, with a dome of muslin draped on high over her head, and she said, under her breath, though not out loud, ‘Mm, you don’t know I’ve seen a fly.’ And then she ran off downstairs again and met her father at that moment issuing out of his den with the topmost joint of a fishing-rod in his hand. He had on his ugly brown suit and thick-soled brown shoes.

  ‘Daddy,’ she called at him, ‘I’ve just been telling him I have seen a fly.’

  ‘Oh, have you,’ said he, ‘you black-eyed young ragamuffin. And what business had you to be mousing into his room this time of morning, I should like to know? And talking of flies, Miss Black-and-White, what would you recommend for this afternoon, so as to make quite sure of a certain Mrs Fat Trout I wot of?’

  ‘You see, Daddy,’ said Maria stiffly, ‘you always turn things off like that. And it was something so very special I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘Now see here,’ said her father, flicking with the tip of his tapering rod-piece, ‘what we’ll do is this, we will. You shall tell me all about that fly of yours when I come in to say good-night to-night. And perhaps by then you will have seen lots of other things. And you shall have a penny for every one that begins with a Q. There’s plenty of flies,’ he added.

  ‘I don’t think I shall care to see lots of other things,’ said Maria – ‘but I’ll see.’ And she walked off, more sedately even than little old Queen Victoria, into the garden.

  Up till then it had been a morning like a blue-framed looking-glass, but now a fleece of cloud was spread over the immense sky. Far away in the kitchen-garden she came across the gardener, Mr Pratt. With his striped cotton shirt-sleeves turned up over his elbows, he was spraying a rose-tree on which that day’s sun even if it came out in full splendour again would shine no more. Maria watched him.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’ she said. ‘Let me!’

  ‘Steady, steady, my dear,’ said Mr Pratt – ‘you can’t manage the great thing all by yourself.’ But he put the syringe with a little drop of the liquid left in its brass cylinder into her hands. ‘Now, push!’ he said, ‘all your might.’

  Maria pushed hard, till her knuckles on her fat hands went white, and she was plum-red in the face. But nothing came. So Mr Pratt put his thick brown hands over hers, clutched the tube, and they pushed together. And an exquisite little puff of water jetted like a tiny cloud out of the nozzle.

  ‘It came out then,’ said Maria triumphantly. ‘I could do it if I tried really hard. What, please, are you doing it for?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Pratt, ‘them’s secrets.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Maria imitating him, ‘and I’ve got a secret, too.’

  ‘What’s t
hat?’ said the gardener.

  She held up her finger at him. ‘I – have – just – seen – a – fly. It had wings like as you see oil on water, and a red face with straight silver eyes, and it wasn’t buzzing or nothing, but it was scraping with its front legs over its wings, then rubbing them like corkscrews. Then it took its head off and on, and then it began again – but I don’t mean all that. I mean I sawn the fly – saw it, I mean.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Pratt, the perspiration glistening on his brown face, and his eyes at least two shades a paler blue than Mrs Poulton’s, as though the sun and the jealous skies had bleached most of the colour out of them. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘A fly now? And that’s something to see too. But what about them pretty little Meadow Browns over there, and that Painted Lady – quiet, now, see – on that there mallow-bloom! There’s a beauty! And look at all them yaller ragamuffins over the winter cabbage yonder. We won’t get much greens, Missie, if you can underconstumble, if they have their little way.’

  Maria could perfectly underconstumble. But she hated greens. She hated them as much as if she had eaten them on cold plates in another world. It was odd too that nobody had the smallest notion of what she wanted to say about the Fly. No one. How stupid. But she looked at the Painted Lady nonetheless. It was limply perched on the pale paper-like flower of the mallow, with its ball-tipped antennae, and sucking up its secret nectar for all the world like the Queen in her parlour enjoying her thick slice of bread and honey. And then the sunshine stole out again into the heavens above them, and drew itself like a pale golden veil over the shimmering garden. The Painted Lady’s wings, all ribbed and dappled orange and black and white, trembled a little in its gentle heat, as if with inexpressible happiness and desire.

  But though Maria admired the creature in its flaunting beauty more than she could say, this was not her Fly – this, at least, was no Maria-Fly. It was merely a butterfly – lovely as light, lovely as a coloured floating vapour, exquisitely stirring, its bended legs clutching the gauzy platform beneath it and supporting its lightly poised frail plumy body on this swaying pedestal as if the world it knew were solid as marble and without any change; even though it now appeared as gentle as a dream.

  Maria was not even thinking as she watched the butterfly, except that she was saying over to herself, though not using any words, that she did not want to go into the drawing-room any more just now; that she had no wish to see her fly again; that she didn’t want ever to be grown-up; that grownups never could underconstumble in the very least what you were really saying; that if only they wouldn’t try to be smiling and patient as though the least cold puff of breath might blow you away, you might prove you were grown-up too and much older than they – even though you had to eat greens and do what you were told and not interrupt old gentlemen writing sermons, and must wait for bed-time – no, she was not really thinking any of these things. But her small bosom rose and fell with a prolonged deep sigh as she once more glanced up at Mr Pratt.

  He was hard at work again with his syringe, and now, because the sun was shining between herself and its watery vapour, it had formed a marvellous little rainbow in the air, almost circular, with the green in it fully as vivid as that of the myriad aphides clustering like animated beads round the stems of the rosebuds.

  ‘I told you,’ she quavered a little sorrowfully, though she was trying to speak as usual, ‘I told you about something and you didn’t take any notice.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said the gardener. But he hadn’t time to finish his sentence before Maria was already stalking down the path, and in a moment had disappeared round the corner of the greenhouse.

  And there, a moment or two afterwards, she happened to come across patient Job, the gardener’s boy. Job was an oaf to look at, with his scrub of hair and his snub nose and silly mouth. He was little short of what the village people called a half-wit or natural. He laughed at whatever you said to him, even when you frowned double-daggers at him. But there was no gardener’s boy like him; the very roots of the flowers he handled seemed to want to net themselves about his clumsy fingers, and he was ‘a fair magician’ with bees. Three little steel mole-traps lay on the gravel beside him where he knelt, and he was scouring flowerpots with a scrubbing-brush, and as Maria appeared he looked up with a face like a good-humoured pumpkin, and he grinned at her with all his teeth.

  ‘Marning, missie,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Job,’ said Maria. She stood looking at him, looking at his tiny pig-like eyes in the great expanse of his good-humoured face, and hesitated. Then she stooped a little and all but whispered at him.

  ‘Have you ever seen a fly?’

  ‘Oi, miss, seen a floi?’ he replied, opening his mouth. ‘Oi, missie, oi’ve seed a floi.’

  ‘But have you,’ and Maria all but let all her breath go – over just those first three words, ‘But have you, Job, ever seen the only teeny tiny fly there ever was: your Fly?’

  Job scratched his head and looked so serious for an instant that Maria feared he was going to burst out crying. ‘Oi, missie,’ he suddenly shouted at last with a great guffaw of laughter, ‘that oi ’ave, and avore I could catch un ee was gawn loike a knoifejack clean down Red Lane ee wor. Oi and ee wor a floi, ee wor.’

  Maria burst out laughing: they laughed in chorus; and then she found tears were standing in her eyes and she suddenly felt silent and mournful. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘you had better get on with your pots.’

  She turned away, her small head filled as if with a tune ages old, and as sorrowful as the sounds of the tide on the unvisited shores of the ocean. There was a little old earwiggy arbour not far away that always smelt damp even after weeks of fine hot weather – though then it smelt dry-damp.

  Maria went into its shadow and stood there by herself a moment. Why she had gone in she didn’t know. It was very still. But mustily, stuffily, gloomily still – quite different from the sunny coloured stillness of the drawing-room. There was a wide droning in the air outside. Millions of minute voices were sounding in concert like the twangling of the strings of an enormous viol. A bird hopped on to the roof of the arbour; she could hear its claws on the wood. Its impact dislodged a tiny clot of dust. It fell into the yet finer dust at her feet. The arbour’s corners were festooned with cobwebs.

  Maria gave yet another deep sigh, and then looked up around her almost as if in hopes of somebody else to whom she might tell her secret tale – about the fly – about Maria-Fly. She paused – staring. And then, as if at a signal, she hopped down suddenly out of the arbour, almost as lightly as a thin-legged bird herself, and was off flying over the emerald green grass into the burning delightful sunshine without in the least knowing why, or where to.

  * As printed in CSC (1947). First published in G.K.’s Weekly, 19 and 26 September 1925.

  Visitors*

  One of the very last things that Tom Nevis was to think about in this world was a sight he had seen when he was a child of about ten. Years and years were to pass by after that March morning; and at the last Tom was far away from home and England in the heat and glare of the tropics. Yet this one far-away memory floated up into his imagination to rest there in its peace and strangeness as serenely as a planet shining in its silver above the snows of remote hills. It had just stayed on in the quiet depths of his mind – like the small insects that may be seen imprisoned in lumps of amber, their wings still glistening ages after they were used in flitting hither-thither in their world as it was then.

  Most human beings have little experiences similar to Tom’s. But they come more frequently to rather solitary people – people who enjoy being alone, and who have day-dreams. If they occur at other times, they may leave little impression, because perhaps one is talking or laughing or busy, working away at what has to be done, or perhaps reading or thinking. And then they may pass unnoticed.

  But Tom had always been a funny solitary creature. Even as a child he enjoyed being alone. He would sit on a gate or a stile for an hour at a tim
e just staring idly into a field, following with his eyes the shadows of the clouds as they swept silently over its greenness, or the wandering wind, now here, now there, stooping upon the taller weeds and grasses. It was a pleasure to him merely even to watch a cow browsing her way among the buttercups, swinging the tuft of her tail and occasionally rubbing her cinnamon-coloured shoulder with her soft nose. It seemed to Tom at such times – though he never actually put the feeling into words – almost as if the world were only in his mind; almost as if it were the panorama of a dream.

  So too Tom particularly enjoyed looking out of his window when the moon was shining. Not only in winter when there is snow on the ground, and clotting hoar-frost, but in May and summer too, the light the moon sheds in her quiet rests on the trees and the grass and the fields like a silver tissue. And she is for ever changing: now a crescent slenderly shining – a loop of silver or copper wire in the western after-glow of sunset; and now a mere ghost of herself, lingering in the blue of morning like a lantern burning long after the party is over which it was meant to make gay.

  Tom was more likely to be left alone than most boys, owing to a fall he had had when he was three. He had a nurse then, named Alice Jenkins. One morning she sat him up as usual close to the nursery table and his bowl of bread and milk; and had then turned round an instant at the sound of something heard at the window. And he, in that instant, to see perhaps what she was looking at, had jumped up in his chair, the bar had slipped out, and he had fallen sprawling on to the floor.

  The fall had injured his left arm. And try as the doctors might, they had never been able to make it grow like his right arm. It was lean and shrunken and almost useless, and the fingers of the hand were drawn up a little so that it could be used only for simple easy things. He was very little good at games in consequence, and didn’t see much of other boys of his own age. Alice had cried half the night after that miserable hour; but the two of them loved each other the more dearly for it ever afterwards. Even now that she was married and kept a small greengrocer’s shop in a neighbouring town, Tom went to see her whenever he could, and munched her apples and pears and talked about everything under the sun.