Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘He’d pop the question,’ I said vulgarly and resentfully, ‘and you know it. And a jolly good thing too, for both of you. What’s more, you’ve never given him an atom of reason to suppose you wouldn’t accept him.’

  ‘I say that’s untrue, Richard. And who asked for your views on that, pray? Be smart, sir, in better season. The Count, you say, would ask me to be his wife – what then? I am not too old; I am not too feeble; I am a practical housekeeper! and – I like the man. He’d ask me to be his wife – and then – as I walked in the garden with him, I should be stumbling and peering, pushing and poking my way. Dark to me! Whatever the happiness within. Richard, you poor blind creature, don’t you see it? Can the Count marry a woman who’s all but eyeless, who can but glimmer to-day out of what will be sightless and hopeless as that night outside, to-morrow? I have been struggling against the truth. I like being here. I like – Oh, I have stayed too long. You stupid, short-sighted men! He has seen me day after day. He has seen me go fingering on from chair to chair. Was I hiding it? Do I or do I not wear spectacles? Do they distort my eyes till I look like an owl in a belfry? Should I wear this hideous monstrosity if – you should have seen, you should have guessed.’

  I put my hand on my aunt’s as it lay on her knee.

  ‘Good Lord,’ I muttered, and choked into silence again.

  ‘That’s it, Richard, that’s common sense,’ she said, squeezing my fingers. ‘It’s all perfectly plain. As duty always is, thank the Lord. He wants a bright, active, capable wife – if he wants any. A blind old woman can’t be that. She can’t be, even if she had the heart. I’m a silly, Richard, for all my sour ways. Poor man, poor volatile generous creature. He’s not quiet and stay-at-home, as his age should be. He’s all capers, and fancies, and – and romance. God bless me, romance! … And that’s the end of it.’

  She stayed; and we heard a light restless footfall upon the gravel beneath the window.

  ‘I never thought I should be saying all this stuff to you; I had no such intention, Richard. But you’re of my own blood, and that’s something. And now off to bed with you, and not another word. Out with him at ten and back with him at twelve. And my boxes at the week’s end.’

  ‘Look here, my dear aunt — ’ I began.

  ‘You are going to tell me,’ she said, ‘that it’s all my fancy; that my eyes are as good as yours; that I shall wreck our old friend’s happiness. My dear Richard, do you suppose that my questions to the little snuff-coloured oculist were not sharp and to the point? Do you think life has not given me the courage to know that one’s eyesight is at least as precious and mortal as one’s heart? Do you think that an old woman, who was never idle in learning, has not by this time read through and through your old friend’s warm, fickle, proud, fantastic heart? There are good things a woman can admire in a man, besides mere stubborn adoration. And the Count has most of ’em. So you see, you would have told me only what ninety-nine young men would have told me nearly as well. I think too much of you to listen to it. The hundredth for me. There, give me a kiss and go away, Richard. I wish to retire.’

  My aunt rose hastily, kissed me sharply on the cheek, hurried me out of the room, and locked the door after me.

  While sitting there in her presence, I had almost failed to see the folly of the business. Her pitiless commonsense had made me an unwilling accomplice. But as I turned over our talk in my mind, I was tempted at once to betray her secret to the Count. He, too, could be resolute and rational and inflexible at need. Nevertheless, I realized how futile, how fatal the attempt might prove.

  To the letter then, I determined to obey her, trusting to the Count’s genius and the placability of fate for a happier conclusion. And even at that – a young man a good deal incensed with the ridiculous obligations these two elderly victims had thrust upon him found sleep that night very stubborn of attainment.

  I had little expected to see my aunt at breakfast next morning; but when the Count came in from the garden, hot and boisterous, she sat waiting for him, and greeted us with her usual cheerful gravity. Only too clearly, however, my new knowledge revealed the tragic truth of her secret of the night before. She leaned forward a little on the table, gazing steadily across it, her hands wandering lightly over the cups, already half endowed with the delicacy at length to come. Never had the Count been so high-spirited, and she answered him jest for jest. Yet not one sign did she vouchsafe to assure me of our compact. She acted her part without a symptom of flinching to the end.

  In a rather clumsy fashion, I fear, I at last proposed to the Count a walk over the Heath.

  ‘An excellent suggestion, Richard,’ said my aunt cordially. ‘There, Count put on your hat, and take your stick, and walk off the steam. It’s no use looking at me. I have business to attend to, so I can’t come.’

  But the Count was exceedingly unwilling to go. The garden held more charm for him, and better company. A faint groping uneasiness, too, showed itself in his features.

  But my aunt would heed no scruples, no reluctances. ‘When a woman wants a man out of the way, don’t you suppose, Count, that she knows best?’ she enquired lightly but firmly. ‘Now where’s your stick?’

  In her eagerness she stumbled against the doorpost, and the Count caught her impulsively by the arm. Her cheek flushed crimson. For an instant I fancied that fate had indeed intervened. But the next minute the Count and I were hurried out of the house, and bound for the Heath. My aunt had herself shut the door, and, heavy with fears and forebodings, I supposed that this was the end of the matter.

  It was a quiet summer morning, the sunshine sweet with the nutty and almond scents of bracken and gorse. At first, in our walk, the Count was inclined to be satirical. He scoffed at every remark I made, and scoffed at his scoffing. But at the bottom of the hollow his mood swerved to the opposite extreme. He walked, bent morosely, without raising his eyes from the grass. His only answer to every little remark I volunteered was a shrug or a grunt. His pace diminished more and more until at last he suddenly stopped, as if some one had spoken to him. And he turned his face towards home.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said to me.

  ‘Wrong?’ said I.

  ‘I heard your aunt calling.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said; ‘she’s two miles distant at least.’

  ‘“Nonsense”!’ said he angrily: ‘I say I heard her calling. Am I all skin and bone? I’m done with the Heath.’

  I remonstrated in vain. It only served to make things worse. At each word the Count’s disquietude increased, he was the more obstinately bent on returning.

  ‘Home, boy, home! I’ll not be gainsaid.’

  I threatened to go on alone; but the threat, I knew, was futile, and proved me at my last resource.

  It was not until we were within a few yards of the house that, on turning a corner, we came in sight of the cab. With a sagacity that almost amounted to divination, the Count jumped at once to the cause of its presence there.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ he hoarsely shouted, and waved his stick in the air. ‘What’s that cab mean, I say? What’s it mean? Have you no answer, eh?’ But after that one swift white glance at my face, he said no more. ‘Bring that box into the house, sir,’ he bawled to the cabman, ‘and drive your cab to the devil.’

  I followed him into the house, and the tempest of his wrath raged through it like a cloud. My aunt was not in the dining-room. Janet had fled away into the kitchen. And I suppose by this time my aunt had heard the uproar of his home-coming, for when the Count assailed her door it was secure, and she was in a stronghold.

  ‘Mrs Lindsay! what’s this mean?’ he shouted. ‘What have I done, that you should be leaving my house like this? Am I so far in my dotage that I must be cheated like a child? Is it open with me? You shall not go. You shall not go. I’ll burn the cab first. You daren’t face me, Mrs Lindsay.’

  ‘Count, Count,’ said I, ‘every word – the neighbours.’

  ‘The neighbours! the neighbours!’ his scorn bro
ke over me. ‘Look to your own pottering milksop business, sir! Now, Mrs Lindsay, now!’

  In envious admiration I heard my aunt open her door. For an instant there was no sound in the house.

  ‘Count,’ she said, ‘I will just ask you to go quietly down to your study and remain there for five minutes. By that time I shall be ready to say goodbye to you.’

  ‘Lucy, my dear friend,’ said the Count – and all the resentment was gone out of his voice – ‘I ask only one thing: you will not treat me like this?’

  ‘Five minutes, Count, five minutes,’ said my aunt.

  The Count came downstairs. He paid no heed to me; went into his study and shut the door. The cabman was on the doorstep.

  ‘Richard,’ said my aunt from the loop of the stairs, ‘the cabman will carry out my orders.’

  I went up slowly and tapped at my aunt’s door. She would not open to me.

  ‘You have failed, Richard, that is all; a man can’t do worse,’ she called to me from the other side of the panels.

  ‘He insisted, aunt,’ I pleaded. ‘I almost used force.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said; ‘you used all the force that was in you. There, leave me now. I have other things to think about.’

  ‘On my word of honour, believe me or not, Aunt Lucy,’ I cried, ‘I have done my best. “I hear her calling” – that’s what he kept saying: and home he came. I would have given anything. Let me tell him. I saw his face just now. Aunt Lucy, he’s an old man —’

  ‘Listen, Richard,’ she answered, and she was pressing close to the door. ‘Say no more. I spoke hastily. I have thought it out; the day will pass; and all the noise and fret over. But, but – are you there, Richard?’ She whispered in so low a voice that I could scarcely catch the words, ‘I go because I’m tired of it all; want liberty, ease: tell him that. “Just like a woman!” say; anything that sounds best to rid him of this – fancy. Do you see? – and not a single word about the eyes. Richard! do you see? You have failed me once. I am trusting you again. That’s all.’

  So I went down and sat a while with my own thoughts to entertain me, in the little room with the French windows and the stuffed birds. In a few minutes I heard my aunt’s footsteps descending the stairs. She was all but groping her way with extreme caution, step by step. Veil or bonnet, I know not what, had added years to her face. I had not heard the Count open his door. But in a flash I caught sight of him, on the threshold, stiff as a mute.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘listen. For all that I said – for an old man’s noise and fury – forgive me! That is past. My dear friend, all that I ask now is this – will you be my wife?’

  My aunt’s eyebrows were arched above her spectacles. She smoothed her wrinkled forehead with her fingers. ‘What did you say, Count?’ she said.

  ‘I said I am sorry – beyond all words. And oh, my dear, dear lady, will you be my wife?’

  ‘Ach – nonsense, nonsense, old friend,’ said my aunt. ‘And you and me so old and staid! Grey hairs. Withered sticks. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the honour. But – why, Count, you discommode an – an old woman.’ She laughed like a girl.

  And she pushed her gloved hand along the wall of the passage, moving very heedfully and slowly. ‘Richard, may I ask you just once more to support my poor gouty knees down these odious steps?’ My aunt was speaking in a foreign tongue. The Count strode after us.

  ‘Is this all?’ said he, gazing into her face.

  ‘God bless the man! – would he stare me out of countenance?’ Her hand felt limp and cold beneath her glove. And we went out of the house into the sunlight, and descended slowly to the cab.

  And that was the end of the matter. My aunt had divined the truth. Her volatile, fickle, proud, fantastic old friend moped for a while. But soon the intervention of scribbling, projects, books, and dissensions with his neighbours added this one more to many another romantic episode in his charming repertory of memories. Moreover, had my aunt chosen to return, here was a brotherly affection, flavoured with a platonic piquancy, eager to welcome, to serve, and to entertain her.

  Not for many a year did I meet my aunt again. I twice ventured to call on her; but she was ‘out’ to me. Rumours strayed my way at times of a soured blind old woman, for ever engaged in scandalous contention with the parents of her domestics; but me she altogether ignored. And then for a long time I feared to force myself on her memory. But when the end came, and the Count was speedily sinking, some odd remembrance of her troubled his sleep. He begged me to write to my aunt, to ‘ask her to come and share a last crust with an old, broken, toothless friend.’ But my poor old friend died the next evening, and the last stillness had fallen upon the house before she could answer his summons.

  On the day following I was sitting in the empty and darkened diningroom, when I heard the sound of wheels, and somehow divining what they portended, I looked out through the Venetian blind.

  My aunt had come, as she had gone, in a hackney cab; and, refusing any assistance from the maid who was there with her, she stepped painfully down out of it, and, tapping the ground at her feet with her ebony stick, the wintry sun glinting red upon her blue spectacles as she moved, she began to climb the flight of steps alone, with difficulty, but with a vigorous assurance.

  I was seized with dismay at the very sight of her. Something in her very appearance filled me with a sense of my own mere young-manliness and fatuity. I drew sharply back from the window; hesitated – in doubt whether to receive her myself, or to send for Mrs Rodd. I peeped again. She had come on slowly. But now, midway up the steps, she paused, slowly turned herself about, and stretched out her hand towards the house.

  ‘Cabman, cabman’ – her words rang against the stucco walls – ‘is this the house? What’s wrong with the house?’

  The cabman began to climb down from his box.

  ‘Agnes, do you hear me?’ she cried with a shrill piercing horror in her voice. ‘Agnes, Agnes – is the house dark?’

  ‘The blinds are all down, m’m,’ answered the girl looking out of the window.

  My aunt turned her head slowly, and I could see her moving eyebrows arched high above her spectacles. And then she began to climb rapidly backwards down the steps in her haste to be gone. It was a ludicrous and yet a poignant and dreadful thing to see. I could refrain myself no longer.

  But she was already seated in the cab before I could reach her. ‘Aunt, my dear Aunt Lucy,’ I said at the window, peering into the musty gloom. ‘Won’t you please come into the house? I have many things – a ring – books – he spoke often —’

  She turned and confronted me, speechless entreaty in her blind face – an entreaty not to me, for no earthly help, past all hope of answer, it seemed; and then, with an extraordinary certainty of aim, she began beating my hand that lay upon the narrow window-frame with the handle of her ebony stick.

  ‘Drive on, drive on!’ she cried. ‘God bless the man, why doesn’t he drive on?’ The jet butterflies in her bonnet trembled above her crimsoned brow. The cabman brandished his whip. And that was quite the end. I never saw my aunt again.

  1 First published in Lady’s Realm, July 1907.

  The Looking-Glass

  For an hour or two in the afternoon, Miss Lennox had always made it a rule to retire to her own room for a little rest, so that for this brief interval, at any rate, Alice was at liberty to do just what she pleased with herself. The ‘just what she pleased,’ no doubt, was a little limited in range; and ‘with herself’ was at best no very vast oasis amid its sands.

  She might, for example, like Miss Lennox, rest, too, if she pleased. Miss Lennox prided herself on her justice.

  But then, Alice could seldom sleep in the afternoon because of her troublesome cough. She might at a pinch write letters, but they would need to be nearly all of them addressed to imaginary correspondents. And not even the most romantic of young human beings can write on indefinitely to one who vouchsafes no kind of an answer. The choice in fact merely am
ounted to that between being ‘in’ or ‘out’ (in any sense), and now that the severity of the winter had abated, Alice much preferred the solitude of the garden to the vacancy of the house.

  With rain came an extraordinary beauty to the narrow garden – its trees drenched, refreshed, and glittering at break of evening, its early flowers stooping pale above the darkened earth, the birds that haunted there singing as if out of a cool and happy cloister – the stormcock wildly jubilant. There was one particular thrush on one particular tree which you might say all but yelled messages at Alice, messages which sometimes made her laugh, and sometimes almost ready to cry, with delight.

  And yet ever the same vague influence seemed to haunt her young mind. Scarcely so much as a mood; nothing in the nature of a thought; merely an influence – like that of some impressive stranger met – in a dream, say – long ago, and now half-forgotten.

  This may have been in part because the low and foundering wall between the empty meadows and her own recess of greenery had always seemed to her like the boundary between two worlds. On the one side freedom, the wild; on this, Miss Lennox, and a sort of captivity. There Reality; here (her ‘duties’ almost forgotten) the confines of a kind of waking dream. For this reason, if for no other, she at the same time longed for and yet in a way dreaded the afternoon’s regular reprieve.

  It had proved, too, both a comfort and a vexation that the old servant belonging to the new family next door had speedily discovered this little habit, and would as often as not lie in wait for her between a bush of lilac and a bright green chestnut that stood up like a dense umbrella midway along the wall that divided Miss Lennox’s from its one neighbouring garden. And since apparently it was Alice’s destiny in life to be always precariously balanced between extremes, Sarah had also turned out to be a creature of rather peculiar oscillations of temperament.