Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘He that lies here was mortal olde,

  All but a hundred, if truth be told.

  His pinpricke eyes, his hairless pate,

  Crutch in hand, his shambling gaite —

  All spake of Time: and Time’s slow stroke,

  That fells at length the stoutest Oke.

  Of yeares so many now he is gone

  There’s nought to tell except this stone.

  His name was Parr: decease did he

  In Seventeen Hundred Sixty Three.’

  The old verger had once more intoned the lines aloud, since the stranger had remained where he had left him. ‘Outside,’ he added, ‘a yard or so beyond this wall, in fact, there is a similar inscription, and one that strikes nearer home; at least to me, sir. I’ll show you the stone itself in a few minutes; but this is how that runs:

  ‘Three score years I lived; and then

  Looked for to live another ten.

  But he who from the Hale and Quick

  Robs the pure Oile that feeds the Wick

  Chanced my enfeebled frame to mark —

  Hence, this unutterable Darke.

  ‘Which is only to declare, sir, that there is more than one way of looking at the same occurrences in life – a point by your leave to which we will return later. In the meantime, sir, if you please, would you step this way?’

  Even Mr Phelps had paused a moment to give dramatic effect to his next exhibit. The tomb now before us,’ he announced, ‘is reputed, sir, to be the finest specimen of sepulchral art we have. Not only in St Edmund’s, but in these parts. And not merely that, neither. The medicos tell me – gentlemen, I mean, learned in such things – that there is not a single bone in the human anatomy missing in this skeleton here – of the finest alabaster. It represents, as you see, the figure of Death, scythe over shoulder, lantern in hand; though, as I’ve heard say, he can as often manage his private business in the dark. Sir Willoughby Branksome was quondam owner, sir, of the old Manor House beyond the village – a family going back into mediaeval times – and the house was built much about the same period as the roof over our heads.’

  The stranger had drawn nearer, and was emptily surveying the ornate details of the tomb.

  Alas! Alack!

  We come not back.

  Adieu! and Welladay!

  Yet, if we could,

  No wise man would;

  What more is left to say?

  ‘Considering the cost and the sculpture work, I must confess,’ remarked the verger, ‘that that has a disappointing ring; at least to my ear, sir. Words and effigy don’t rightly match. Besides, as you can see for yourself, counting the two rows of them there, he left nine ungrown children behind him, not including the smallest already gone, and holding a skull in her infant hands. Ten, sir, must be a burden to any mother. Quality, or otherwise. And she did well by some of them, too; as you can see by the marbles to either hand – a countess there, and a Lord Admiral here. The truth is, times change. What is common human nature in one age is unbefitting levity in another.’ He turned for a word of approval, and so met for an instant the direct leaden lustreless gaze of his companion in the church. ‘Here, for example,’ he hastened on, ‘is such doggerel as no chisel would be allowed to cut on sacred walls in these days – a Henry the Eighth in private life. And yet, are we any more conscionable of the facts?

  ‘Here rests in peace, Rebecca Anne,

  Spouse of Job Hodson, Gentleman.

  Here also Henrietta Grace,

  Destined to lie in this same place.

  And Jane, who three brief years of life

  Did bear the honoured name of wife.

  Here also Caroline (once Dove).

  And him, the husband of the above.

  ‘And that, sir, is a standing example, as I have heard our good Bishop himself declare, of God’s plenty!’

  Daylight had been steadily draining out of the church, and dusk seeping in. The last hues of the sunset had long since vanished from the stone walls beyond the dog-toothed arcade of the clerestory windows. A small indistinct shape had begun soundlessly flitting to and fro beneath the timbers of the roof overhead. The great church, cold, serene, motionless as if frozen, was preparing itself for the night.

  Visitors to it – ignorant, frivolous, inquiring, learned, indifferent, were all in Mr Phelps’s daily round. Never had he encountered one so frigid and irresponsive. There hung too about him a vague hint of the earthy; as if he might have slept overnight in a cellar. Was he intelligent enough – that tallow-flat face – to have followed what had been said? Or was perhaps the gentleman a little hard of hearing? Or was he merely humouring his cicerone, passing the time away, until he could get about his own private business? A word or two of inquiry, Mr Phelps was well aware, might at once set him on the right track. Nevertheless he refrained from uttering it. Patience no doubt would at last be its own reward, even if the sands of day were ebbing low.

  ‘If only, sir,’ he remonstrated, with a disarming smile, ‘you had happed in on me a few minutes earlier, I could have shown you our crypt. There’s many who visit us solely for that purpose. But it’s beyond hours already now, and down there it must be long ago pitch dark. What’s more, the rector has a mortal dread of fire.’ He held his head sidelong a little, and a childishly naïve and deprecating smile descended into the furrows of his long jaw as he added – ‘both here, and hereafter. Besides, we should have no light left for the churchyard.’

  With the faintest indication of a gesture the other seemed to intimate that there was no necessity for haste, that time was of no concern to him, and a church as pleasant a lodging for the night as any. He had sluggishly followed the verger into the bell-chamber under the west tower, glancing up narrowly, as he did so, at the slack ropes looped dangling through the holes in its ceiling.

  ‘Now here, sir,’ said Mr Phelps, coming to a standstill again, ‘is what was in my mind to speak of a moment or two ago. Some four or five summers since, not to put too fine a point on it, there came here a grey-faced, stunted little old brat of a man – and I had my misgivings the moment I set eyes on him – who first listened me out, and then, quite deliberately, sir, told me to my face that all I had been repeating was nothing but holy hocum: his very words. “I don’t give that for your old stones and bones,” he said, and spat on the floor. Now in my humble estimation, sir, that man’s was the soul of nothing short of a maniac’s. He had gone bad, and the devil had entered into him. I gave him a look, sir: I led him to that door, without a word more uttered: and I shook the dust of him from off my feet.

  ‘That’s one side, one extreme of the story. On the other; that we mortals should dread the tomb – that’s only natural. And it’s when we are nearing the end that what may be called the real takes on another colour, sir. You look at those about you and can’t any more so surely rely on what they are, if you take me. As once you could. There is so thin a crust, sir, in a manner of speaking, between being awake and asleep – very fast asleep indeed. A sip of a doctor’s drug, and not only the lantern goes out but everything it shone on. I had that experience myself not more than a month or two since – only a decayed tooth, sir: outer darkness, and then the awakening. If that comes. It is like as if we were treading a flat fall of untrodden snow and suddenly it is thin ice – cat ice, as we used to call it when we were boys – and we are gone. Not, mind you, that the waters of death, however cold they may be, are not – well, the waters of life. Faith is faith. What then do you conjecture must the infidel think of finding statements in stone in a Christian church which are sheer contrary to its own beliefs? Not that I should be repeating this to every visitor. That would be neither meet nor proper; besides, few would care. But even in this small parcel of ground around us here we have no fewer than five dimetrically different views on the subject – dimetrically different. Here, for one, is the grave of a child named Blackstone, Timothy Blackstone, who, as we read for ourselves, “was borne a Weakling and lived but to be three years old”. Bu
t what is said of him? –

  ‘O Death, have care

  Only a Childe lies here.

  A fear-full mite was he,

  My last-born, Timothy.

  Shroud then thy grewsome face,

  When thou dost pass this place;

  Lest his small ghoste should see,

  And weep for me!

  ‘The ghost of a child, sir, mark you, and a very young child. And no doubt it is his mother who is speaking, or one who is speaking for his mother. And yet, poor lamb, he is considered as being still frightened and still forsaken – at evils that were long, long ago all safely over!’

  The stranger had raised his hand again, had turned with mouth ajar, as if to expostulate. ‘One moment, sir, if you please,’ cried Mr Phelps. ‘Cheek by jowl with it, as you see, we have “O. A.” – no more than the initials, and the years, 1710–1762 – and this!

  ‘Who: and How: and Where: and When –

  Tell their stones of these poore men.

  Grudge not then if one be bare

  Of Who, and How, and When, and Where.

  Such is nought to them who sigh

  Still with their last breath, Why?

  ‘That’s another way of looking at the riddle, and, I grant you, in our low moments there’s a good deal to be said for the “Why”. But what I am bearing towards, if you follow me, is whether we are not already edging into the neighbourhood of the heathen, sir? And yet, mark you – light itself by comparison – here’s another, clean contrary to both:

  ‘Son of man, tell me,

  Hast thou at any time lain in thick darkness,

  Gazing up into a lightless silence,

  A dark void vacancy,

  Like the woe of the sea

  In the unvisited places of the ocean?

  And nothing but thine own frail sentience

  To prove thee living?

  Lost in this affliction of the spirit,

  Did’st thou then call upon God

  Of his infinite mercy to reveal to thee

  Proof of his presence –

  His presence and love for thee, exquisite creature of his creation?

  To show thee but some small devisal

  Of his infinite compassion and pity, even though it were as fleeting

  As the light of a falling star in a dewdrop?

  Hast thou? O, if thou hast not,

  Do it now; do it now; do it now!

  Lest that night come which is sans sense, thought, tongue, stir, time, being,

  And the moment is for ever denied thee,

  Since thou art thyself as I am.

  ‘While here again, sir, beneath the very soles of our feet,’ he tapped the stone with the capless toe of his shoe, ‘here we have Richard Halladay, and a very fine piece of lettering, I allow – though a few words, as you see, have been worn flat by the bell-ringers’ treadings, sir.’ He glossed the inscription as he read:

  ‘Each in place as God did ’gree

  Here lie all ye Bones of me.

  But what made them walke up right,

  And, cladde in Flesh, a goodly Sight,

  One of hostes of Living Men —

  Ask again – ask again!

  ‘And last this, which, being human, we all can share. It was, sir, my poor dear mother’s favourite of them all:

  ‘O onlie one, Fare-well!

  Love hath not words to tell

  How dear thou wert, and art,

  To an emptie heart.’

  He had paused before attempting the last line. ‘But now, sir,’ he went rapidly on, ‘to continue my argument. We all feel and realize that when the grief is on us. But what I am asking myself is what one of these Mohometans or suchlike, heretics as we call them, would think of so much of the contradictory, sir, in so little space! The fact is, when it comes to a question of truth – and, “What is Truth?” said Pontius Pilate – it’s as if each and every one of us had his own private compass. From birth, sir. The needle pointing not due north, mark you, never that, but a few hairsbreadths or more short of it. As life goes on, now this way it veers, now that; and the most we can do as it seems to me, is to see that it doesn’t jam.’

  A little breathless, a fresh apprehension transfixing his pale face, he paused a moment – his own needle havering rather more widely than usual – as if to let this reflection sink in. Mr Phelps’s stranger had at last found voice again.

  ‘You forget,’ he was saying, ‘that every syllable inscribed on these walls was put there by the living. None by, but only of the dead. Better, a thousand times, I agree, a single word of pity and forgiveness than – nothing at all. As for any attempt to return, a mere child could have little occasion for it. But these others – do they, do you suppose, never come back?’ The last few hollow, challenging, half-stifled words had rung out oddly in the silence of the church – and far more exclamatorily than Mr Phelps’s pleasant tenoring.

  Back, back, back, had quietly fainted away the echo – as if indeed the masons of the ancient building when fitting stone to stone had childishly so adapted its acoustics as to ensure a device of which the Elizabethan dramatists and the old poets never wearied. A long pause followed. But the set black eyes in the expressionless face were still apparently expecting an answer. The verger thrust his hand into his cassock pocket, drew out an immense handkerchief, and replaced it. He temporized.

  ‘I agree, sir,’ he smiled inquiringly, ‘that the dead cannot compose their own epitaphs! They might make queer, ay, and moving reading if they did. The riddle to me is what sort of question you could put to such a one as Lazarus as you’d most wish to have answered, as would assure the point. But taking your question merely as it is put, I would not deny the possibility of such occurrences. God forbid. One may become aware of what is unusual, yet not know. You would be astonished, sir, how even the hopping of a bird, or the skirring of a withered leaf in the draught over the stones, will sound out in these walls when I’m alone here. And it’s seldom so late. Nor would I deny that now and again I have fancied that other occupants …’ His glance fixed on his visitor, a temporary confusion had spread over his mind, and he failed to complete his sentence. ‘But, there; the human eye, sir, can be a great deceiver!’

  ‘That indeed is so,’ the low insistent voice rejoined, ‘but there may be those who prefer not to be seen?’

  The verger disliked being cornered, but he had sat under many preachers.

  ‘The points as I take it, sir, are these. First,’ he laid forefinger on forefinger, ‘the number of those gone as compared with ourselves who are still waiting. Next, there being no warrant that what is seen – if seen at all – is wraiths of the departed, and not from elsewhere. The very waterspouts outside are said to be demonstrations of that belief. Third and last, another question: What purpose could call so small a sprinkling of them back – a few grains of sand out of the wilderness, unless, it may be, some festering grievance; or hunger for the living, sir; or duty left undone? In which case, mark you, which of any of us is safe?’

  His visitor lifted a heavy head and looked at him. ‘But the living themselves,’ he said, ‘have instincts, hidden impulses, are driven, beaten, incited on to what may at last appear the unevadable. Then why not they? What proof is there … only “duty”? They might, no more than the living, be aware of any purpose, yet be compelled to pursue it. And assuredly,’ he hesitated, ‘if, at the end, there had been extreme trouble and – horror.’

  The harsh screaming of the swifts coursing in the twilight beyond the leaded windows before they retired into the heavens to sleep out the night upon the wing, was for the moment the only comment on these remarks.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Phelps uneasily at last, ‘I confess you press me close. But we are still no nearer what you had in mind, and I must be locking up. Perhaps you would care to take a glance at a few of the stones in the churchyard, if there is light enough left? But, first,’ he added, with a little bow of old-fashioned courtesy, ‘and I trust I haven’t been detainin
g you, sir; would you very kindly put your name in our Visitors’ Book?’

  The well-worn volume stood on a table by itself. He set it open at the current page, and himself dipped the pen into the inkpot. His visitor accepted the pen, paused, and, without again raising his heavy eyes, stooped over the book.

  Mr Phelps politely retired, drew open the great door, and his visitor, rather reluctantly, it seemed, and still as far as space permitted keeping his distance, presently edged out and preceded him into the churchyard. From their haunts in the green hills came yet again the sweet and sorrowful cry of the peewits. The air in the porch, after the stony chill within, struck warm on the cheek, and mild as new milk, laden faintly with the earth-sweet fragrance of the hills and the remote freshness of the sea. The evening star in the tarnished gold of the west shone liquid and solitary. The verger feasted his eyes a moment on this quiet scene.

  It was as if he had half-forgotten but had now retrieved it, after some dark passage of the mind. An unusual sense of fatigue, mind and body, had stolen over him, and he was relieved that his catechism was over. Few visitors volunteered many questions. If they did, they were questions expected, easy to answer – concerning dates, styles, uses, rituals and so forth. He regretted now, but only because he was unwontedly tired, that he had not a moment ago seized his opportunity to bid this stranger Godspeed. He was none the less astonished to discover on issuing from the porch that he had already vanished. Since he was nowhere within sight, he cannot but have made his way round the east end of the church. Had this, he mused a little forlornly, been merely with the notion of evading the customary tip?