Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  He eyed again the strange house, rising in solitude under the blue sky among the slopes of the mountains. He fancied that in the distance he saw living shapes, moving on the terraces beneath it, though he could not detect what they were. What then? he asked himself again, and began to be afraid. And though even Sambo himself could not have believed that Satan would ever venture into a place so full of light and peace as this, an even wickeder thought had stolen into his mind. Why should he not pretend that he himself was his master, that he was the Doctor? There had been not a word in the letter to say that the last Miss Bleech knew his master. Not one word. That was perhaps why she hadn’t begun her letter with the word ‘dear’. Perhaps then, if he himself gave her only half the doses he had intended to give her, she would get better only half as quickly. Then he might stay on and on and on – and never go back. No, never.

  As he sat there in his ermine in the snow with this thought in his mind, there suddenly sprang into view beneath him a wild white buck rabbit, with eyes like burning coals. At least Sambo thought it was a rabbit, though it was much bigger than any he had ever seen before. Stiff as a post in the snow and for the best part of a minute, it glared at Sambo – not fiercely but because its eyes were so full of light. Then, as if assured he meant it no harm, it made a little noise that was almost like laughter, and scuffled its hind legs rapidly in the snow. Other creatures like it answered. And soon the whole expanse beneath Sambo – and there was a dark lake of ice encircled with frosted trees at its foot – was alive with rabbits – hundreds and hundreds of rabbits, large and small. They paid no heed to Sambo, no more than if he had been as spotlessly white as they were themselves. Perhaps, thought he, they had not noticed his hands or his face. But the old lady would. When she saw he was black, she would not only not believe he was a doctor, but might tremble with scorn and hatred. What then?

  He was so tired and hungry he could think no more. So, his basket on his arm, he set off again, and presently came to the back parts of the house. Apart from the faint-coloured shadows cast by the sunlight on its roofs and walls, it was white all over. Here there were many little outhouses like beehives capped with snow, and they seemed to have been all of them freshly whitened. Peeping about Sambo saw in a corner under the house a large tub or butt, put there as if to catch the rain. He stole over and lifting himself by his hands to its edge, peeped in. The butt was half full of a thick white liquid, like whitewash. He hauled himself up, and stooping over, broke the thin sheet of ice that wrinkled its surface and dipped in his finger. It came out white as milk. If the tip of a finger, why not his whole body? Surely here was the end of all his troubles!

  He hesitated no more. He stripped off his ermine cloak, his silver-buttoned tunic, his black trousers, his shirt, his shoes, everything he had on. And there and then, naked and shuddering with the cold, he climbed up over the edge of the butt, let himself down, and three times over dipped himself head to foot in the creamy ice-cold water – face, hands, woolly hair and all. Once safely out, he ran about until he was caked dry. Then he put on his clothes again. No one, it seemed, had heard his splashing; no one had seen him. But as he was snapping-to the silver clasp of the cloak at his throat, having put on his master’s goggles from out of his basket, he heard a little noise. Out of its dark shining eyes a gentle deer stood watching him in the snow. It was hornless and as white as he himself; nor did it start back or hasten away when he came near. He put out his white crudded hand and stroked its gentle head. And because of the friendliness of the deer, he was afraid no more. Cloaked and peering, he went round to the front of the house, and mounting the steps, knocked solemnly on the great door.

  It was opened by the butler. At least Sambo guessed him to be the butler, for he had seen many butlers. But he had never seen one so old or so odd to look at. Over a long starched waistcoat his spotless swallow-tailed coat almost brushed the floor. His nose was even broader and flatter than Sambo’s, his lips as thick and his hair as woolly, and, except for his face, he was almost as white. He looked sorrowful, too, and full of care. And though Sambo’s lips were stiff, partly with the whitewash and partly because he was telling a lie, Sambo told him not who he was but who he was not. He then asked him how his mistress did, and if she were well enough to see the doctor.

  ‘Ah, massa, massa,’ replied the old butler, lifting his hands in grief; ‘worser and worser!’ And without another word he led Sambo up the wide white staircase and along a corridor whose windows looked out upon the mountains; and then he tapped at a door.

  When Sambo saw the last Miss Bleech in her great bed, her high, narrow, silvery head reclining on the pillows, her far-away blue eyes fixed on the window in front of her, he knew that she was not long for this world. And he wept inside to think it. It seemed she must be at least ninety-eight, if not even ninety-nine. Her voice was so small and low he could scarcely hear what she said to him. But when the butler told her who this visitor was, she smiled at Sambo. She was rejoiced to see him, even though she could see him but dimly. Not too dimly, however, to realize that this was not only the whitest of doctors that had ever come to do her good, but the whitest of human beings. All her other doctors, though she had needed few since her childhood, had been dressed up in solemn long black coats to match their hats and trousers; and of all things in the world she liked black least. Or rather, she loved white best; though Sambo did not know this, then.

  But first, she thought only of his comfort. She bade the butler show him to his room. It had been specially prepared against the coming of the visitor whom she had been pining so much to see, and it was next her own. She told Sambo, as he stood there – small, staring, and motionless at the foot of her bed – that she knew how cold and wearisome a journey his had been. Nor did the old lady so much as sigh when she said she would not be troubling him for long. Her one hope was that he would stay with her as many days as he could spare.

  Sambo, who had often mimicked his master’s speech and manners behind his back, imitated them, as well as he could, now. He told the old lady that he thought she was looking a little better, and that he would do his best to make her quite well again. So long as there is breath in the body, he said, there is hope. ‘Care, fijjick, sleep,’ he said, lifting a finger. But he kept his dark spectacles turned away from the light of the window as he spoke, in terror lest she should look close into his whitewashed face and know him for a cheat.

  When Sambo was alone in the lofty room that had been made ready, when he looked round him at the tall bed canopied with white velvet, the sofa, the carpet – deep and thick as moss, but white too itself as snow – he sat down on a stool, and burst out crying. He was young, he was alone, he was weary; but it was his villainy that weighed heaviest. Still, he cried only for a few moments, and at once hastened over to the great glass on the dressing-table, to see if his tears had left their traces on his cheek. No; he had dipped deep in the whitewash, and stains there were none. Indeed, at first glimpse of himself – that sheeted face, small hoary hands, a dwarf in ermine – terror seized him. It was as if he had met his own ghost. And then he sighed. He was whiter even than his master! He eased the buckle at his throat, turned his head, and looked out of the window.

  Beneath him the mountain fell away in snowy terraces towards the valley far below. Trees and bushes heaped in snow and glistening in the sun of evening met his wondering gaze. The sweet yet sorrowful cry of winter curlews wafting their way through the windless air came to his ear. And beneath them strayed strange creatures he had neither seen before nor knew the name of. Some were antlered, some were small and nimble, and all of so pale a colouring that they could scarcely be seen against the snow. And though, so vast was the view from his window, they were scattered far apart, they seemed to be at peace with one another. Not a voice yelled Yah, no cry of wrath or pain pierced the air. It was as if, gazing out over these snow mountains and valleys, smooth and radiant beneath the blue, Sambo had been transported into the place called Nowhere. And for a while he forgot
that he was black.

  Day after day he tended the old lady, putting so infinitesimal a pinch of his master’s powders into her physic-bottles and so much nicey-nicey that she enjoyed taking her medicine, and would even sip instead of merely swallowing. Sambo would sit for hours in silence at her bedside, touching her hand now and again with his rough-washed fingers, not in order to tell if she were feverish but merely to comfort her, and to prove that he was there. And the longer he stayed with her the more she came to find ease and comfort in his company, and the sadder Sambo grew: first, to think that she was now too old ever to be young again, and next, that he was deceiving her. But try as he might, and though he often lay long hours awake brooding on this, he could not find words to tell the old lady, whom he now loved dearly, what a dreadful net of falsehood he was in.

  Once when the black was beginning to dim his whitewash he had to steal down to the outhouses for another coat. And though this time the sudden shock of cold from his tub brought on a hacking cough, fortunately, packed up in his basket, he had brought with him a powder good for coughs, and as his patient did not need it, he took it himself.

  When his cough was better, he would sometimes sing to her, in his shrill falsetto, songs of his own people that he had heard as a child. Among her favourites, and his, was the lament beginning, ‘Weep no more, my lady!’ And as he sang it, the black rolling eyes of the child would meet the faded blue of his friend’s, and it was as if by the mere grace of the music they shared an unsearchable secret.

  Weep no more, my lady,

  O, weep no more today!

  We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,

  For the old Kentucky home, far away…

  And then, for better cheer, Sambo would warble up, ‘Shine, shine, Moon!’ or, ‘So Early in the Morning’; though at the words –

  When I was young, I used to wait,

  On Massa’s table lay the plate,

  Pass the bottle when him dry,

  Brush away the blue-tail fly…

  his memory ran back in a flash to his master, and his voice shook.

  At length, one afternoon, after a long silence, as he sat on his customary stool by the great bed, he asked the old lady if she minded things looking what they are not. And he turned his face full into the light as he said it.

  ‘Why, but no, my dear kind doctor,’ she replied to him. ‘It is not what things look like that matters most; but what they are.’ When she was young, she went on – almost as if, without knowing it, she were reading his thoughts – once, when she was young, she had loved colours – every faintest colour and hue and tint visible in the rainbow; though some of them of course were her favourites. But all colours, her father had explained to her, even when she was a little girl with short pigtails dangling round her head, lie hidden in white. ‘White,’ her father had told her, ‘is not a colour at all; it is all colours.’ She had never forgotten that. And the longer she lived, she told Sambo, the more she had come to delight in white: snowdrops, anemones, the convolvulus; dew before the sun rises; hoar-frost; foam of falling water; the sea’s spray. So at last she had come to live in these mountains where there was snow nearly all the year round, and all living creatures shared in its splendour.

  ‘Listen, doctor, is it not the voice of birds I hear? Look out, now, at their wings of light!’

  Sambo lifted his heavy head and looked out of the window. But the birds must have been in the old lady’s mind. There were none in the heavens.

  He asked her then if she had ever travelled in the Black Man’s Land, in the country of the Darkeys. Was it not a dreadful thing, he entreated her, to be born like that? Black?

  ‘Why, no, dear doctor,’ she assured him eagerly. ‘Never to me. That again is what my father used to tell me. White gives back all colours; black welcomes them in. What is the centre of every seeing human eye, he would say; black. Besides all things on earth have an out and an in. Even an apple hangs there on its twig for the sake of its seeds. A black man whose mind is free from darkness and his heart from cruelty is in truth whiter than any one whose soul is in the shades.’ And she smiled to herself after listening to this little sermon to one so learned as a doctor; but she had seen that Sambo was in some trouble of mind.

  ‘Ay,’ said Sambo in a lamentable voice. ‘And de blackest ob all dings, lady, dat is a lie!’ And he hastened out of the room.

  It was curious perhaps that one so young as he, and with so little royal blood left in him by now, should have wept as he did at the thought of a lie. But weep he did.

  That night, after he had given the old lady her physic, and it was all but all of it nicey-nicey, for most of his powders were gone; when he had seen that she was in comfort, and had lit her wax candle in the silver candlestick beside her bed, he bade her good-night, and locked himself into his room.

  A shallow tin white bath lay underneath his bed. He dragged it out in front of his dressing-table and emptied the cold water out of his jug into it. There was no more than an inch or two of water in the shallow bath, and he was three coats thick with whitewash. So that it took him a long time to sponge and rub and scrape himself black again, or as nearly black as he could manage. When he had finished and was dry, he lay down on the sofa to rest awhile, for he wished to rise at daybreak. Then he would tell the old lady all he was, his one fear being that it might make her worse. But it was impossible the next morning to make the last Miss Bleech worse, for when Sambo, having unlocked his door, went in at daybreak, she was dead.

  He stood at the foot of the bed, gazing out of his blackness at the placid face upon the pillow, at the birdlike hands on the counterpane. And he nodded his woolly head, in his grief, as if to say, Too late! At last he stole nearer and ventured to put out his ink-black fingers and touch her ice-cold hand.

  ‘Sambo am here, lady,’ he whispered.

  But there was no look in his friend’s fixed eyes to show that she had heard. And as in his misery he stood there, he saw beside the candlestick a slip of paper folded in two. ‘My last wishes’ was written on it and beside it was a long envelope, sealed down. Sambo took the slip of paper to the window, and though the handwriting was very spidery and shaky he had learned it long since under the linden trees, and in a few minutes he had read the message within.

  ‘Dear friend, and far more than Doctor,’ it said, ‘after your kindness and goodness to me, beyond any physic, I wish to leave you all I have. You will see that my butler and the others shall never want. Take care of the animals, and never put on anything but white for me. And may heaven bless you. Emily Bleech.’

  Sambo read this over and over; then put it back where he had found it. His grief and love were almost greater than he could bear, but there was only one thing he could do. Having emptied his bath-water out of the window, he hastened downstairs. Not a soul was stirring. It was as if the strangers of night had but a moment before left the round beehive outhouses to their daily solitude. Three times Sambo dipped himself from crown to sole in the great tub; and came out like chalk. He was doing what his friend wished him to do.

  After a few days had gone by, and Sambo’s heart was less troubled, he did one or two things that he wished for himself. When he ran off from his master he had no thought of money except what would take him to the Mountains. It was only time he pined for in which to grow white. And now time stretched out before him like the sands of the desert, the face of the sea. And he thought again of what was past. He made up a parcel of money – containing twice as much as he had borrowed from his master; one single Stars-and-Stripes banknote with a great many noughts on it to pay for the ermine cloak; and a hundred dollars over for the missing medicine. This parcel he despatched secretly to the doctor, with From Sambo written inside the paper but no address. At the same time he sent fifty dollars to the most famous candy shop in the doctor’s town, telling them to deliver to Mr Tooth-the-Dentist’s boy a large jar of Maple Sugar, a keg of dates, a cake of a black dainty made of molasses called brandy-bread, and a blu
e-and-white pot of the finest Chinese ginger.

  After all, Sambo thought, he might never have come to the Snow Mountains if it had not been for this caterwauling young vagabond, and he would know by this that Sambo was ‘off the streets’! As for the butler and the other servants, they could never even have hoped for a kinder master. ‘Of all de massas he was best.’

  And yet, in the years that followed, as he lived on at peace in his mansion in the Snow Mountains, gazing out of his window – a thing he never wearied of – a strange craving at times would creep into Sambo’s mind. And the fear would take him that Satan was nearing again. At this he would steal to his looking-glass, and confront, on and on, that speckless face of chalk from eyes as motionless and dark as basalt.

  ‘O but for a moment,’ a voice would cry out on him as if from the very recesses of his being. ‘O but for a moment, to be black again!’ And always, to silence the voice, Sambo would pick a few snowflowers and go down and lay them on his old friend’s grave. There he would stay for a few moments, alone in the valley, looking up at the tranquil hills; and then, slowly and solemnly shaking his whitewashed head, would return again – comforted.

  * As printed in CSC (1947).

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

  The entries under the eight main collections, R (1923), DDB (1924, 1936), Br (1925), C (1926), OE (1930), LF (1933), WBO (1936) and Beg (1955), which have been used as the framework for Short Stories, include all the known information about:

  (a) the serialization of stories and their publication in book form before they appeared in

  those collections, and

  (b) their later inclusion in other collections of

  de la Mare works during his lifetime.