Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  He could recall many such hints of human nature – pious and prosperous pilgrims absent-mindedly debating if perhaps sixpence would be enough. To describe as sardonic any smile on so mild, horse-resembling and pensive a face as the verger’s would be absurd. In his own small way he was an artist. Tips were not his sole incentive. Besides, his comfortable little balance in the Savings Bank needed no refreshing, not at this late day. He could, then, easily afford this faint grin of amusement. The horseleach hath two daughters, crying Give, give!’

  No, it was the gaucherie, the unfriendliness that piqued the old man. And not merely that, something else, less easy to describe. Should he let him go, or be after him? This was not his first visit to the church – of that he was convinced. Then why pretend it? Had the stranger hoped to find himself alone there? For what purpose? Now that Mr Phelps was no longer listening to his own voice – perhaps his favourite occupation – hitherto unheeded impressions had begun to coagulate in his mind.

  Clothes, manner, gait, speech – never in his long experience had any specimen of a human being embodied so many peculiarities. And there was yet another, pervading all the rest, but more elusive. The verger was a confirmed dreamer. His office, perhaps, and his daily surroundings accounted for a more active night-life. In this he was apt to have strange experiences – to find himself surveying vast shelves of sloping rocks, the sea, enormous buildings, their bells ringing, but not to summon humanity within their walls. At this very moment – wideawake though he had supposed himself to be – he might have issued from such a dream. The body sometimes seems as precarious as if it had but just been put on. And now, quite another suspicion had struck across his mind. Was this man – was he – quite sane? That taciturnity, the vigilance, the dark, fixed, lightless eye, the galvanic gestures, the evasiveness. No; to put it crudely, it would be as well to see him safely off the premises.

  He hastened away, the hem of his iron-black cassock rustling over the grass as, in spite of his sixty-odd years, he stepped nimbly across the intervening mounds. And though he was half prepared to find no trace of his visitor, there was nothing unexpected in that visitor’s appearance when, on skirting the outer walls of the Lady Chapel, he set eyes on him again. He was standing in engrossed contemplation of yet another tombstone, and evidently unaware that he was observed.

  Solitary thus in this dusky green on the colder north side of the high old ecclesiastical mansion, and motionless as an image in a waxwork show, he looked, if not exactly more real, at least more conspicuously actual than anything around him. It was almost as though he had dressed up to simulate a certain part on the stage of life, and had overdone it. But perhaps Mr Phelps himself was now overdoing it a little! He was at any rate taking liberties, and had no intention of playing the spy. He coughed discreetly. But his visitor had either not heard this announcement, or had taken no notice of it. He had remained unmoved, peering, as if shortsightedly, at the defaced inscription at his feet, one which Mr Phelps could easily have repeated to him, word-perfect:

  He who hath walked in darkest night,

  Stars and bright moon shut out from sight,

  And Fiends around him cruel as sin,

  Finds welcome even the coldest Inn.

  With no more than a slow unsteady movement of his head, he presently turned aside to the stone of Susanna Harbert, ‘Spinster of this Parish’:

  Let upon my bosom be

  Only a bush of Rosemary;

  Even though love forget, its breath

  Will sweeten this ancient haunt of Death.

  But if any bush had ever been planted there, it was gone. Instead, a delicate forest of summer grasses and a few wild flowers concealed the flattened mound.

  ‘You will pardon me breaking in, sir,’ interposed the verger, but drawing no nearer, ‘there are very few inscriptions in this part of the churchyard; it is seldom visited. If you would give me even so much as a name to go by, it might be, sir, within my recollection. I have been here for many years. But the stone itself will almost certainly be on the south side.’

  The stranger, looking, as Mr Phelps afterwards put it to himself, more like a copy of a human being than ever, continued for some moments merely to gaze at him; but not as if there were any activity of speculation behind his fixed eyes. ‘The name?’ he repeated at last, as if he had drawn the word cold and dripping out of some unfathomable well of memory. ‘The name was Ambrose Manning … It was said he had made away with himself. It was said …’ But nothing further came.

  ‘Ah!’ ejaculated the verger in unfeigned dismay … ‘And the date, sir, perhaps?’

  ‘1882.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ was the hesitant reply, ‘we are on the right side.’ The syllables he had heard, though they had been uttered in so low and lifeless a voice, were now being called, whispered, echoed in every chamber of the old man’s memory. Where, where, had he seen, heard, that name before? ‘You see,’ he was explaining, ‘at that time, and perhaps even now, his remains would not so much as have entered the church; not felo de se, sir. The whole service, a special one, would be at the grave’s side. There was one, I recollect, many years ago, the rain pouring in torrents, and a heavy sea running. But,’ he added, as if in apology, ‘not fifty years ago!’

  By this time he was thoroughly wearied of his task. He had been ill-advised to linger so long – this craving for any listener. His one desire was to get back to his cottage and to the cold supper that was awaiting him. Nevertheless he was still reluctant to leave such a visitor at large and to his own devices in the precincts of the church. Only two grave-stones, however, now remained between him and freedom; he would at any rate wait them out. They leaned slightly askew under a much-lopped but still hardy old yew tree, one of them encrusted from summit to base with a thin, pale mantling of grey and green.

  Traveller, forbear

  To brood too secretly on what is here!

  Death hath us in his care.

  There is no Fear.

  But thou, in life – Oh, but I thee implore,

  Stray thou amidst these dangerous shades no more!

  Mr Phelps was observing his visitor with some anxiety. He looked like a man upon the verge of a trance, a cataleptic, a somnambulist. ‘I have never myself,’ he told him, ‘been aware of any “danger” here. And, as you yourself pointed out but a few minutes since, though I confess the thought had never occurred to me, not in that shape, sir – it is the living who are speaking to us from these stones – not the dead. Or at least, those who were living at that time. And last,’ he went on, since no response had been vouchsafed to him, ‘there’s this.’ He emphasized the word, in a tone of finality, pointing with his finger. ‘But it’s “N. F.” – as you see, sir; and so the initials don’t suit with the names you mentioned. A very tragic case, too – for more than one; as I remember hearing when a boy:

  ‘Here lies the Self-Dishonoured Body of N.F. who

  perished miserably by his own Hand on October 31 in

  the year of our Lord 1875.

  See now, if thou have any heed

  For thine own soul, now hence make speed!

  Here in this waste of briar and thorn

  Sojourns one hungry and forlorn,

  Self-murdered, unassoiled, unshriven,

  Haunting these shades twixt Earth and Heaven.

  O get thee gone; no biding make;

  Lest the Unsleeping find the Wake!’

  The stranger (having as it appeared digested these words also), with a peculiar motion of the head, again glanced gently around him, then lifted his colourless face towards the dimly gilded hands of the clock in the church tower. Whereupon, the bells within, as if in response to a silent invitation, chimed out the hour – that of compline. Perplexed, even vexed at this taciturnity and poor fellowship, Mr Phelps remarked a little coldly that ‘this’ was ‘the nearest way out’. But again to unlistening ears, for his visitor with no more than a last furtive and empty yet concentrated glance at him, had turned aside
, and was already making his way under the dark trees towards a stile which gave egress to a plank bridge over a brook, and so to the hills beyond.

  Mr Phelps watched him until he had vanished – not merely from sight, but as if the dense motionless foliage had swallowed him up. There was not a sigh of wind to stir the flowering grasses. The waters of the brook in their narrow ravine were singing a quiet tune; a corncrake was calling in the meadows beyond the low stone wall. All was as it had ever been. The verger turned about at length and paced slowly back to the south porch. Should he or should he not re-enter the church? Should he postpone what he had in mind until the morning? He was aware of a distaste to linger any more. And yet …

  He adjusted the key, stepped across the threshold into the darkened building, paused, drew to the heavy door behind him, paused again, then deliberately locked it. Having lit a stub of candle, which in its brass dish-shaped holder he took from a cupboard in the vestry, he unlocked a small iron safe and laid the burial book on the table. The gilt of its title – Register of Burials, Church of St Edmund; Langridge – had nearly faded from out of its covers. Having adjusted his eyeglasses on the extremity of his long stooping nose, he stood there in the stony silence, the radiance of the candle striking up into his long face, etching in with black shadow the lines upon it, chiefly of kindliness, long service and curiosity. Then with a wetted finger he slowly turned over the leaves until he came to January 1, 1882.

  After that he drew his finger steadily down each of the following few pages in turn until he came to November 4. Memory had not deluded him; at least not wholly. ‘November 4. Ambrose Manning,’ he read. Nothing more than that, and even this had proved to be erroneous. A thin line in red ink had been drawn through both names, and in another hand there followed a scrawled – ‘Nothing known. Not buried here.’

  Mr Phelps – his eyebrows mounted high on his conical bare forehead – continued for a few moments to scrutinize the entry: he could recall no other example of the kind. How many years had it been since he had chanced on it? ‘H’m, not buried here,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Strange … Why not, then … ? And where?’

  ‘Where?’ an excessively faint voice from nowhere had muttered as if in reply. Scrupulous servant of habit that he was, though a little jarred, he put back the book into the iron chest, locked it, and, cupping the lighted candle with his bony fingers, made his way out of the vestry. The Visitors’ Book lay open, as he had left it, on its narrow table, the pen beside it, now dry. Mr Phelps glanced down at the scribbled page. The latest entry on it was the signature of Helen Jane Wilkinson (Mrs) of 1a Portsea Terrace, High Wycombe. His last visitor then, taking advantage of his own courtesy, had merely pretended to write his name. There was no reason to suppose that he could have forgotten it!

  The verger’s grey eyes wandered vacantly over the scribbled page. He felt a trifle cold, empty, anxious and oppressed. And as he stood pondering, momentarily severed and estranged as it seemed for the first time in all these years from the beloved, familiar building in his charge, a faint sound arrested his attention. A sound that was no more than a whisper, as of a minute clot of plaster falling from the roof onto the flags beneath. He jerked his head sidelong towards the door that he had but a few minutes before locked behind him.

  He held his breath to listen again; then, puffing out his candle-end, crept to the cranny of the door, remaining there as motionless for a while as a cat at a mouse’s hole. Slowly and stealthily at length he pushed the key into the lock, turned it in the oiled wards, and drew open the door. But no. The sound he had heard can have been no more than a mere fancy. The ancient porch stood empty; the southern sky now framed beyond it was studded with a few brightening stars. He was unutterably relieved; and yet not wholly so. A hitherto unheeded misgiving was gnawing in his mind. Poor creature – he was debating within himself; this man had come to him hungry, famished, it seemed, for help, and had gone away unsatisfied. He realized now that he had swallowed an extreme distaste for his visitor only in order to indulge his own love of talking. Yet, even at the worst there had been nothing of active evil in that mask of a human face, only an animal-like patience and obstinacy, clay-cold, impassive. No signal of hope either, or of comradeship; only the sediment of an unspeakable obsession. He might have been searching for years. But why?

  Nor had it occurred to the verger, he ruminated mutely, to offer his belated visitor even so much as a glass of cold water. A few words of comfort, of reassurance – they would not necessarily have been cold. And – least commendable perhaps of all motives – you never can tell when you may not be needing them yourself.

  1 Added in 1936 edition of Ding Dong Bell. First published in Yale Review, March 1936.

  Winter1

  All the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry …

  Any event in this world – any human being for that matter – that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one’s senses. So at least it appears to me. The experience lives on secretly in the memory, and you can never tell what trivial reminder may not at some pregnant moment bring it back – bring it back as fresh and living and green as ever. That, at any rate, is my experience.

  Life’s mere ordinary day-by-day – its thoughts, talk, doings – wither and die away out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs: and that goes too. It is mere debris; it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age – forsaken nests, everlasting clumps of mistletoe.

  Not that they either are necessarily of any use. For all we know they may be no less alien and parasitic than those flat and spotted fungi that rise in a night on time-soiled birch trees. But such is their power to haunt us. Why else, indeed, should the recollection of that few moments’ confrontation with one who, I suppose, must have been some sort of a ‘fellow-creature’ remain so sharp and vivid?

  There was nothing much unusual in the circumstances. I must have so met, faced, passed by thousands of human beings: many of them in almost as unfrequented places. Without effort I can recall not one. But this one! At the first unexpected premonitory gloom of winter; at sight of any desolate stretch of snow; at sound at dusk of the pebble-like tattling of a robin; at call, too, of a certain kind of dream I have – any such reminder instantly catches me up, transports me back. The old peculiar disquietude possesses me. I am once more an unhappy refugee. It is a distasteful experience.

  But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.

  Nor is now the actual motive of my journey of any consequence. At the moment I was in no particular trouble. No burden lay on my mind – nothing, I mean, heavier than that of being the kind of self one is – a fret common enough in these late days. And though my immediate surroundings were unfamiliar, they were not unusual or unwelcome, since, like others who would not profess to be morbid, I can never pass unvisited either a church of any age or its yard.

  Even if I have but a few minutes to spare I cannot resist hastening in to ponder awhile on its old glass and brasses, its stones, shrines, and monuments. Sir Tompkins This, Lord Mount Everest That – one reads with a curious amusement the ingenuous bygones of their blood and state. I have sometimes laughed out. And queer the echo sounds in a barrel roof. And perhaps an old skimpy verger looks at you, round a pillar. Like a bat.

  In sober fact this human pomposity of ours shows a little more amiably against any protracted background of time – even a mere two centuries of it. There is an almost saturnine vanity in the sepulchral – ‘scutcheons, pedigrees, polished alabaster cherubim and what not. You see it there – like a scarcely legible scribbling on the
wall. – well, on this occasion it was not any such sacred interior I was exploring, but a mere half-acre of gravestones huddling under their tower, in the bare glare of a winter’s day.

  It was an afternoon in January. For hours I had been trudging against a bitter winter wind awhirl with snow. Fatigue had set in – that leaden fatigue when the body seems to have shrunken; while yet the bones keep up a kind of galvanic action like the limbs of a machine. Thought itself – that capricious deposit – had ceased for the time being. I was like the half-dried mummy of a man, pressing on with bent head along an all but obliterated track.

  Then, as if at a signal, I looked up; to find that the snow had ceased to fall: that only a few last, and as if forgotten, flakes were still floating earthwards to their rest in the pallid light of the declining sun.

  With this breaking of the clouds a profounder silence had fallen upon the dome-shaped summit of the hill on which I stood. And at its point of vantage I came to a standstill awhile, surveying beneath me under the blueing vacancy of the sky, amidst the white-sheeted fields, a squat church tower, its gargoyles stooping open-mouthed – scarcely less open-mouthed than the frosted bells within. The low mounded wall that encircled the place was but just perceptible, humped with its snow. Its yews stood like gigantic umbrellas clotted with swansdown; its cypresses like torches, fringed, crested, and tufted with ash.