Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  Now the head village where Mr Bumps’s friend the Chief of the Mlango-Nlangoes lived was a mile or more from the banks of the Quanza. It lay beyond a swamp where there is a forest of mangroves, the abode of countless crocodiles, though the two-horned rhinoceroses keep to the river. Between the river and the swamp (where, if there were hundreds of crocodiles there must have been thousands of monkeys!) was a stretch of sand and green.

  In this spot, out of sight of the river, but well in reach of the trees, the black men whom Mr Bumps’s friend, the Chief of the Mlango-Nlango tribe, had very kindly lent him for the purpose, brought up not only Jasper’s crates and tubs and boxes and barrels of rare nuts and fruits, fruits in syrup, biscuits, beads and gewgaws, etc, but also his money chests crammed tight with sovereigns and silver. For nothing that Mr Bumps or Mr Johnson or Mr and Mrs Smith could say, could persuade Jasper that all this money of his was just that and nothing more, and would be of no more use to his friends in their treetops, except perhaps for the beauty of it, than nut-shells or pebble-stones. It had been given to him, he kept saying, for what he had done; and therefore he would like to take it all back to his people – except of course what he wished to spend on the presents he had given to Mr Bumps and his other friends.

  Since, then, Jasper, however much they argued, still wished to take back his money with him, Mr Bumps had said of course, ‘Let it be so.’ Just as the King had said.

  When all Jasper’s possessions had been piled up in the open space between the hidden river and the forest which he had chosen for his camping-place, and when a small bell-tent had been pitched for him beside them, it was evening. Strange voices of all manner of animals and birds sounded in their ears when Mr Bumps bade his friend good-night.

  ‘I hope, Jasper,’ he said, ‘ay, and more than hope, that your kith and kin over there will be pleased to see you. I hope so. But they have been keeping mighty quiet.’

  He said it with a faint heart, smiling at his little friend dressed up, as he had himself decided, in his robes of gold and crimson, his sable cap on his head. Still, since Mr Bumps had promised to come back in the morning, this was not good-bye. It was only good-night.

  When Mr Bumps did come back in the morning, Jasper greeted him sadly enough. Though he had heard in the night faint chatterings and shufflings, not a single friend of all he had known in past times – not one – had come near him. So at Mr Bumps’s advice they unpacked some of the boxes and crates containing the dainties that smelt sweetest and strongest and strewed them about in enticing piles some little distance away from Jasper’s tent and nearer the forest.

  Next morning these had vanished; and yet Jasper had remained solitary and unvisited in his tent all the night long. He had not slept a wink. Never mind, he told Mr Bumps; his friends were no doubt shy and timid. He was sure they would be pleased to see him and longed to speak to him and welcome him back.

  But morning after morning the piles grew less and less; the food was all gone; the toys and trinkets were scattered out of the boxes; only the money, the sovereigns and the silver, were left. And these the monkeys, having smelt and fingered them, left disowned.

  Jasper thought at last it must be his royal robes, his antelope slippers, his cap and his colours that kept his people from knowing who he was. He said this smiling, to his friend Mr Bumps, but not as if he quite believed it.

  That evening when they parted again, the air over Africa was heavy and stagnant and the sky lowering. Silent lightnings gleamed ever and again above the distant forests, and they could hear the tom-toms of the Mlango-Nlangoes sullenly drumming from their hidden dancing-places. Jasper had stripped himself of all his finery, and stood up beside his tent only in his own fur – a little monkey, as he was before. Mr Bumps shook him by the hand.

  ‘Good-night, old friend,’ he said, ‘and God-speed.’

  But when he came back the next morning after the storm, the cap and the robes and the slippers and the gilded sceptre were gone. The tent had been blown away. And Jasper was gone too. Mr Bumps called and called and called. He came back in the evening and called again. No voice answered him. The forest lay dark and silent. Three days, by the kindness of the captain, to whom he had sent a black man as messenger, he waited and waited. But he waited in vain. And on the fourth The Old Lion sailed away.

  * As printed in CSC (1947). The story was published by itself as Mr Bumps and His Monkey in Philadelphia in 1942.

  Sambo and the Snow Mountains*

  Sambo’s great-grandfather had been a king in his own country, though it was only a small country. Sambo’s grandfather was brought to the White Man’s Land by a missionary, whose name was Grimble, the Rev Silas Makepeace Grimble. He had been born in Aberdeen. Sambo’s father, after being Mr Grimble’s eldest son’s valet and coachman, set up in business as a barber. But though he merrily did his best, he couldn’t get enough customers, either for haircutting, singeing, shampooing or shaving. He would sometimes sit for hours in his empty shop beside the basin, staring out into the sunny street. So at last he was compelled to pull down the blind, put up the shutters, and take down his pole; and he soon afterwards died; and was laid to rest beside his beloved Dinah.

  That leaves Sambo. Sambo was Dr Grimble’s pageboy – Dr Grimble being the Rev Silas’s great-nephew. The doctor lived in a tall brown house made of wood. It had three lombardy poplar trees in front of it and honeysuckle grew over the porch. Sambo had many duties. With his twenty-one little silver buttons in front of his tunic, and a little peak behind over his tight trousers, he used to open the door to his master’s patients and show them into his waiting-room. It was a small but cheerful room with mosquito-screens at the windows, black and white oilcloth on the floor, a picture over the fireplace, and a lovely fall of coloured horse-hair piled up in the grate beneath, all through the summer. This cascade hid the ugly bars of the grate. So in summer there was no need for Sambo to blacklead them.

  Sambo also helped his master to mix his medicines. When the doctor had put the drugs into the bottle, Sambo added the water; when the doctor had rolled out his pills, Sambo put them into the pill-boxes. By means of a large stick of red sealing-wax and a little blue gas-jet, he used to seal down the paper after he had wrapped up the bottles and boxes. He enjoyed the sealing-wax part of his work far better than the bottle-washing – in a small square leaden sink under a tiny brass tap.

  All this was in the early afternoon. When the bottles had been neatly wrapped and numbered, Sambo used to put them into his basket and carry them off to his master’s patients. Sometimes he had to walk one mile, sometimes three, sometimes even five – and right into the country. The time so taken depended on how many candy shops, other boys, performing animals, street musicians, dog-fights and other pleasures or dangers he encountered on his way to and fro. So long as he was home again at his master’s house by six, all was well. In the evening he waited on the doctor while he ate his supper, and this the doctor did very quickly. Sambo brought him his grog about nine, and then went to bed.

  On the whole, Sambo was happy, though until he became unhappy he had not noticed it much. Though he scampered with beating heart at sound of his master’s call, he admired the reddish hair that stood in a little wall above his forehead, his gold spectacles and handsome watch-chain. He had enough to eat, time to be lazy in, and a truckle bed with a flock pillow in a little box-room under the roof. There was only one thing against him. He was black. He was as black as all his ancestors. He was as black as a bale of velvet, as a cellar with no windows in it, as a chimney full of soot.

  He might not himself have much noticed this if the pale-faced boys of the town were not always reminding him of it – particularly a pug-nosed little rascal called William who was page to a dentist of the odd name of Tooth: Mr Tooth. This William, whenever he met Sambo – partly because he was jealous of his buttons (which were silver), and even of his two-lidded basket (which was covered with mottled American cloth), but mostly because he knew no better – would yell at si
ght of him, ‘Yah! Blackamoor! Yah! tar-face! Yah! you little grinning bandy-legged monkey-jibbed lump of ebony! Off the streets with you! Streets is for white men!’

  At this Sambo, pretending not to have heard him, would at once cross the road. White or black or coffee-coloured, it was beneath him, he told himself, to be seen fighting with a dentist’s boy. But he knew in his heart he was afraid of William, and he crossed the road. Still, it was chiefly his black skin that was now on Sambo’s mind. And now it troubled him not only because of his enemies, the street boys, but for his own private sake also. After all, he knew that the rest of him, what was inside, was little different even from his master’s. And even his skin was not his fault. Yet the more intently he pored over his young face in his bedroom scrap of looking-glass, the blacker he seemed to get.

  This could not have been so in his own country. There, to be black was bliss. His great-grandfather, as he knew, had been a king in that country and it was white boys who would be laughable there. Indeed, when first the Rev Silas Grimble appeared in Poojooboo, the black women and children laughed so much among themselves at his tall hat, pale face and silvery whiskers – supposing that his clothes were as much a part of him as its spots are part of a leopard – that at last they became quite friendly with him. They liked him because he looked so amusing. But not even they – not even the piccaninnies – laughed at him to his face. That was not their manners. If, then, William the dentist’s boy had taken ship to Poojooboo to find Sambo on the throne, the boys in the streets under the bread-fruit trees would have yelled their Yahs at him – but not out loud.

  Sambo knew enough of all this, mused on it when he was alone, to make him feel not only unhappy but homesick. It was not, then, that he pined merely to be a white boy. There were white boys he knew by sight he wouldn’t have pined to be for anything in the wide world. No, he only saddened more and more at having to stay black. He wanted to be all white and yet himself. This sorrowfulness came over him in curious ways.

  On getting up in the morning, for example, he would remember again – if there had been any light to see him by – how black he must have looked between his sheets. Or again, after blowing out his candle on going to bed – and Dr Grimble gave him only an inch at a time so that he should not undersleep himself – he would realize that without his nightshirt he could not be seen in the dark. There was nothing sad or dreadful in either of these facts – not really; but they stayed in Sambo’s mind. They haunted him as a spectre might a copse.

  Perhaps if Sambo had not been so slow in his mind he might soon have learned to be less vain. But he had never been told that to grieve over what one is not may be as vain as to simper at what one is. He had been told very little. So night and morning, Sambo stared at himself in the scrap of looking-glass he treasured. Round, glossy, solemn, his young face stared back at him; and alas, as black as jet!

  But though Sambo was slow by nature, though his master always told him things twice over to make sure, though on his rounds he always walked much further than he needed to walk because he made mistakes in arranging the houses he had to walk to, Sambo was persevering, even stubborn. What he began he finished. If mere trying could have blanched him, he would soon have become as fair in aspect as an albino. He took the greatest pains.

  First he prayed to be made white, and almost sobbed in his bed, watching in vain for the angel he had hoped might come down through the starry night at once in answer. Then he gave up the kitchen black bread that by rights was his, and lived on the white scraps of French rolls left over from his master’s table. The doctor’s livery was a dark green, with yellow edging. But Sambo was allowed to wear a white drill waiting-jacket in the mornings – after eleven o’clock. This he himself washed and ironed three times a week and wore in private whenever his master was out, particularly on the days when the doctor went to see his Aunt Clara and spent the night at her house. Often in fear Sambo slept with his head under his bedclothes lest the night itself darkened even the dark. But all such efforts were in vain.

  At last one morning – but by no means for the first time – he heard the doctor mention scarlet fever, and that very afternoon he himself carried round a large bottle of medicine to the patient who was suffering from this sad malady. This gentleman lived in a square house covered with vines and creepers, and Sambo could see the shutters drawn close across the windows behind which he lay in bed – bright red, as Sambo supposed, from head to foot.

  This reminded him of another patient of the doctor’s – a lady who was from Mexico and whose fever had been yellow; and of a little girl with auburn curls who had been at death’s door with yellow jaundice, and whose small brother was afterwards brought to the doctor suffering from pink eye. His master too had once had for cook a negro mammy who at full moon was always oppressed with what she called ‘de blue debbles’. And what but the doctor’s medicines had cured them all? Surely, pondered Sambo, if physic could take away scarlet, yellow, blue and pink, it could wash out black?

  Sambo cast his eye towards his master’s shelves of bottles and jars and could scarcely wait in patience until he was alone again. He had often been warned not to meddle with them. But then, what a happy surprise it would be for the doctor if one morning Sambo appeared in his bedroom to pull up his blinds as white as himself. He might double his wages.

  So one by one Sambo tried every kind of medicine on the shelves in turn, except the poisons which were kept locked up in a small cupboard. Of each he took no more than the least sip and only one sip at a time. If, after removing the glass stopper, the medicine had a very pungent or nauseous smell, he took even less. As with the bottles, full of essences and tinctures, so with the powders and the pastes and the pills. Of every powder he took no more than half a saltspoonful; enough to cover the tip of his little finger of every paste; and half a pill of every kind and size.

  Most of these medicines made no difference at all – but then, being little more than a child, Sambo did not at first venture to taste more than one of them at a time. Others made him giddy, or hot, or breathless, or limp, or excited, or silly, or talkative, or thirsty, or hungry – or just the reverse; and one or two of them made him sick. After these his face looked a little green, but even then it was only a black-green and soon passed away. In spite of all this pain and trouble, Sambo remained precisely as black as ever, then, if not a little blacker.

  It was odd perhaps that the doctor never noticed either that any of his medicines were dwindling, or that Sambo sometimes looked peculiar. But then he was not an observant man, and he was short-sighted. Besides, though Sambo did not know it, it would have made no difference to his master if he were grey or brown, striped, dappled or piebald. So long, that is, as he did his work well. On the other hand, the doctor was quick enough to notice when Sambo made a mistake – let his little leaden tank run over, delivered a medicine at the wrong house, packed the wrong pills in the right box or vice versa. And then Sambo noticed him. But Sambo always made it a rule to take very little indeed from any jar or pot that was less than half full.

  When Sambo had tasted every kind of physic in his master’s dispensing-room – sweet, sour, salt, bitter, dry, oily, thick or thin, including even one or two little remedies that were kept for the doctor’s best patients’ pet or lap-dogs, stuff to make the eyes bright, or the hair grow, or the teeth clean, or the nails lustrous, and nothing was of any avail, he became sadder than ever. Still, he did not despair, and this was a blessing, for if he had, his poor heart might have become almost as black as his face. Instead of despairing, he began to read the doctor’s books. But since of the words on every page he had to look into a dictionary to find the meanings of at least 20 up to 100, and then forgot them, he did not get on very fast or far.

  And then one day – he had just brought in the doctor’s grog on his salver – Sambo dared to ask him a question.

  ‘If you please, Massa Doc’r,’ he said, ‘s’posin’ you’m wanted to be ebber so black like poor Sambo what fijjick wou
ld Massa take?’

  Unfortunately the doctor was a little deaf as well as short-sighted, and all he said was, ‘No, no; that will be all to-night.’

  On hearing this, Sambo rejoiced. He thought his master meant that this very evening, after he himself was gone to bed, he would try to turn himself black: ‘That – the taking of the physic – will be all to-night!’ It seems almost impossible, but Sambo did. And he waited up until he fell asleep about three in the morning kneeling at the doctor’s keyhole in the hope of seeing it happen.

  He asked his master only one more question, and this was the last question he had ever need to ask. He had thought it over and over for three whole days before. It was a much bolder and braver thing to do even than to call back at the dentist’s boy, ‘Yah! Chalk-face! Yah! Mammy’s milkysop! Off of de streets wid you! Streets am for gentlemen!’

  At nine o’clock as usual the following evening he went into the doctor’s room with the silver grog-tray in his hand – but nothing on it. It so chanced the doctor was asleep in his chair with his mouth open. So Sambo had to clank with his salver on the table to wake him up. That made the doctor vexed.

  Then he noticed the tray was empty, and he said, ‘What’s that for?’

  And Sambo said, ‘Dere isn’t no rum left, Massa Doc’r’ – for rum was the doctor’s fancy.

  ‘Where is it gone?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Me had it, Massa Doc’r,’ said Sambo.

  ‘You!’ shouted the doctor. ‘What for?’

  ‘Oh, Massa,’ said Sambo, falling on his knees, ‘to make pore Sambo lose his black. To wash him grey, Massa Doc’r, then white like the little lambs, like Massa Doc’r himsel’. Oh, sir, begorra, I wash and wash and wash, and scrub and scrub and scrub, and rum only polish Sambo’s nose and smart his eyes.