Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  The Connoisseur1

  PARK STREET

  It was a narrow discreet street, and, in this late evening twilight, all but deserted. There had been rain, bringing with it an earthy fragrance from the not far distant park, and small clear puddles of water filled the hollows of the paving-stones. Clumsily picking his way between them, St Dusman came shuffling along between the houses to keep a rather belated tryst. He paused now and again to examine the numbers on the fanlights, and at last halted, at No. 13, where he stood for a few moments peering in over the spearheaded palisade that guarded its area. As yet the curtains of the shallowly curved window abutting on the street had not been drawn nor its shutters closed.

  From a candelabrum on a lacquer Chinese table in the midst of the room, electric tapers cast their beams upon the exquisite objects that stood around them. This sharp metallic light bathed ivory and porcelain, the wax-like flowers in their slim vase, the few pictures, as if they were the sacred relics of a shrine.

  The old creature’s eyes gazed vaguely through their magnifying spectacles at this scene of still life, then groped onward towards the figure of a man, as yet apparently in his early thirties, who now stood in the doorway, slim, sleek, dark – as if for foil to the very vase on the table with its pale green leaves and flowers. His neat head was stooping forward and inclined a little towards his left shoulder, for at that moment with intense interest and vigilance he was vainly endeavouring to see the old man out there in the darkening street as clearly as St Dusman could see him.

  The old man hesitated no longer. With the aid of its wrought steel handrail he mounted the three shallow steps of the outer door, under its narrow shell-shaped porch, and rapped softly with his knuckles on the panel. The stranger himself hastened to open it, though for an instant or two he seemed to have paused with fingers on its catch, and after the briefest scrutiny of the face of his visitor from penetrating green-grey eyes, led him, almost as though surreptitiously, into the very room which the saint had surveyed from without. And he himself drew their curtains over the windows.

  ‘You may not have been expecting me, Mr Blumen?’ said the old man courteously, still a little breathless. ‘Although, indeed, I am a little late. My friends detain me at times. And this is my last errand for the day.’

  Mr Blumen’s eyes were now steadily fixed on his visitor’s face. ‘I must confess,’ he replied, ‘that I was not expecting you. Not, I mean, to-night.’

  ‘But you had not entirely forgotten me?’ the old man pressed him whimsically. ‘You have now and then given a passing thought to me? I leave footprints outside.’

  Mr Blumen smiled, at least with his lips. ‘You bring back at least one old memory – an experience often repeated when I was a small boy – in Bath, you know. The experience, I mean, of being “called-for”. Now and then, for there are many kinds of parties, it was a relief, a positive god-send.’

  There was just a hint of the formal in this rapid and not unfriendly speech. It had been uttered too in a lowish voice, though, even at that, the characteristic slight lisp and blurred r’s had been detectable.

  The old saint peered up at the young man over his thick-glassed spectacles. ‘I can well understand it,’ he said at last. ‘It meant returning home. Ours is a longer journey, Mr Blumen.’

  The dark eyes had sharpened. ‘It has a goal, then?’

  ‘Surely!’ replied the old man. ‘Were you uncertain even of that? Not,’ he added candidly, ‘not that the metaphor carries us quite all the way. Lassitude follows after most races; and what are called goals and prizes may be disappointing. But what – if I may venture – suggested to you that any journey in this world, in any precise meaning of the word, has an end?’

  ‘Well,’ replied Mr Blumen, ‘there are many philosophies, and one may listen to all without being persuaded to accept any.’

  ‘But hardly without divining any – just on one’s own account?’ returned the old man, almost as if he were smilingly bent on coaxing a secret out of a child. ‘Wouldn’t that be a little unfair to the mere facts of the case? Now I’ll be bound, Mr Blumen, when you were a small boy, you must have dreamed now and then? So far at least you were conscious of circles within circles – and without – so to say?’

  There was remarkably little of the childish in the keen, ashen face confronting him. The dark, large-pupilled eyes had wandered almost stealthily from point to point of the objects around them, every one of which seemed now to be flashing secret signals one to the other in this motionless creek of air.

  ‘Well possibly,’ replied Mr Blumen. ‘But even a pessimist would agree that it is as well to make the best one can of the one “circle” – without vexing oneself too much with shallow and futile speculations concerning any other. And optimists; well —’ a slight shrug of the narrow shoulders completed the sentence. ‘I must be quite candid, though. I am unconscious of the least wish in the world to bid adieu to what they call “things as they are” – to things, that is, as they appear to me to be. I realize, none the less, that you have obligations. And – thank you for fulfilling them so considerately.’

  At this, the old man folded one hand over the other under his loose sleeves, sighed, and quietly seated himself on the edge of a chair that stood nearby. ‘Thank you, Mr Blumen,’ he said; ‘I will enjoy a moment’s needed rest.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ cried the other hastily, turning as he spoke towards the tiny sideboard – riding there in the offing, as it were, of this bright inward pool of silence, with its delicate cargo of Venetian glass and wine.

  But his visitor pleasantly waved this little courtesy aside. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Blumen,’ he explained, ‘and you are exceedingly tolerant, I haven’t the head for it. And though I am familiar with our route – almost excessively familiar – we shall still need our combined cold wits to face it out. You were saying “things as they are” – a stimulating phrase enough in itself. Still, I have no very close knowledge of what you call the world; apart, I mean, from my daily duties. May I assume that “things as they are” now surround us?’ The aged eyes peered carefully and cautiously once more through their thick glasses. ‘That is so? Please, then, tell me why you are disinclined to leave them. You have seen a good deal of them?’

  Mr Blumen drew in his underlip as if to moisten it with his tongue. He paused; in search of words. ‘Well,’ he ventured at last, ‘partly, I suppose, because of those weeds of superstitious fear planted in one’s mind when one is young; partly because life can be uncommonly entertaining; and partly because I dislike leaving what I have spent a good many years making my own.’

  ‘Making your own!’ echoed the gentle old voice a little drily; though there was a twinkle in its owner’s eye. ‘But you will not be ceasing to think when we make a start. And surely it is only thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams, and so on that you can really claim as having been made your own.

  ‘In a sense,’ agreed his quarry. ‘But then I’m no Platonist, either. One’s friends, one’s pursuits, one’s possessions’ – he made a little gesture with his right hand that till that moment had been reposing in his pocket – ‘surely they are the very proofs of one’s self that one hungers for. Not of course that they can be permanent; or need be.’

  ‘Friends are friends,’ said the old man. ‘I can understand that. But possessions? I take it, Mr Blumen, that you would include in that category what I see around me. Perhaps you would tell me why you value them so highly. Were there not things less perishable to possess; things that of their own nature would be less inclined to bid you good-bye? That old image of Kuan Yin over there, for example, is she any the more or less a symbol than the very ferocious onion-green dragon displaying his tail on that pot yonder? Better both in the imagination, don’t you think, Mr Blumen, than – well, round one’s neck? Besides, earth-time is fleeting. Was it ever, do you feel, worth while to do more than merely borrow its energies, apart from much else; and be grateful?’

  ‘To whom?’ Mr Blumen blurted.
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br />   ‘That is a question,’ retorted the old man serenely, hugging his hands a little closer under their wide sleeves – ‘that is a question which it would take rather more earth-time than you and I have at our disposal just now to answer.’

  The shoulders beneath the neat dinner-jacket slightly lifted themselves. ‘We don’t always expect answers to our questions,’ he said.

  ‘Well now, see here,’ said the old man, and he vigorously readjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his broad and rather stumpy nose. There are many similar things to these in every house in every neighbouring street, are there not? Is it just the sense of possession that is the charm? Or of being possessed?’

  ‘Things similar, perhaps,’ smiled Mr Blumen indulgently. ‘But I need hardly suggest to an adept like yourself that many of the specimens around us at this moment are practically unique. And do you mean to imply, sir, that the beauty and rarity of a thing amount to nothing in what perhaps – whether expressed in earth-time or otherwise – you would agree to call the long run?’

  ‘Come, come,’ said the old man, ‘surely rarity is the reward of a mere acquisitiveness? While as for beauty; indeed, Mr Blumen, in my humble office – a little arduous, too, at times, if I may confess it – there is not much leisure for beauty. Still, I think you will agree that what you and I mean by the word, and so far as we are personally concerned, it depends solely upon the eyes in our heads. And we have a good many, you know. With the exception, too, of the rare flowers on your table – specimens, I suspect, which would hardly be recognized even by their less remote ancestors – everything here, I notice, is – what shall we call it – of human workmanship.’

  ‘They are works of art,’ agreed Mr Blumen. ‘They represent years of human skill, human delight, and human devotion and desire. What have you against them? For that matter what has he against them who has so punctually provided me with your company this evening?’

  A very sober countenance now scrutinized Mr Blumen – and the old man, as if to suit posture to face, seemed to have composed himself even more heavily in his chair. He gazed hard, but made no answer; then turned his head and almost cautiously surveyed the objects around him as one by one they met his eye.

  All the familles were there: noire, verte, and rose; each of them signally represented by elegant ambassadors, only the more amiable and acceptable for their extreme age. On half a dozen varieties of gods, on fabulous heroes and monsters renowned in old tales, and on exquisite Tanagra figures, and shapes of beast, bird, and fable, made small in priceless images of stone, earthenware, porcelain, enamel, ivory, metal, alighted his gentle glance. The faintly greenish glass on table and sideboard, like colourless and heatless crystal flame, lifted its burden of gimcracks, sweetmeats, and liqueurs, a few inches aloft.

  The rugs beneath the old man’s mud-stained feet by far excelled in blended colour and design the minute French masterpieces in paint, and the worn, dimmed tapestry that here and there relieved the delicate gilt of the walls and of the few chairs. A smiling cherub disguised as Father Time stood on tiptoe with uplifted scythe above the minute gilt clock, ticking out Mr Blumen’s envious moments upon the carved chimney-piece. The fragile peace around him and his visitor indeed was so tenuous it seemed that at any moment it might explode, and shatter itself into its component atoms. When the old man’s voice again broke the silence, it was positively as if he himself had shattered in sheer actuality some crystal image lifting itself into the still, elastic air.

  ‘You would, I believe, Mr Blumen, be surprised,’ that voice was murmuring gently, ‘you would be surprised at the range of humanity that lies reflected around us. Here and there our company – and, as you well know, whatever a man does is to some extent a mirror of what he is: here and there (and forgive me for confessing it) that company, I say, is detestable to the last degree. You will be well rid of it. There are poisons that enter by the eye as well as in the blood. What is even worse – except for that moth searching the shadows over there, whose presence no doubt is explained by my poor company – I perceive here no faintest sign of life. Of life, I mean, here and now.’

  A thin dark cloud had mounted into Mr Blumen’s pallid face. ‘If you had consented to delay your visit even by half an hour,’ he retorted, with a contemptuous gesture towards the two chairs drawn up to the table, ‘your last remark would hardly have been to the point.’

  ‘Do not misdoubt me,’ replied his visitor courteously. ‘I have no very acute intelligence. But I have heard the rumours of busy domestic sounds from below; and I detect preparations for a visitor. But I meant by life a happy freedom of the spirit rather than mere amusement of the body. A life delighted in.’

  ‘A pet canary, perhaps?’ But the voice was almost too tired to be insolent.

  ‘Why not indeed?’ replied the old man, ‘if you took a lively pleasure in it. Still, cages remain cages; and you yourself would agree with me that heart and soul you yourself are something of a recluse. And this I gather is your hermitage. And I have seldom in a pretty wide experience of such things seen a cage more elaborate. You are content with it?’

  Mr Blumen stared a little heavily into the face of his visitor. ‘If you know anything of the society in this neighbourhood, and if you mean that I enjoy solitude, then I am in complete agreement with you.’

  ‘So would any chrysalis be,’ said his visitor almost gaily. ‘I grieve with all my heart that you are compelled to resign things you have grown to care for – hoarded, Mr Blumen; that it is now too late, I mean, to have given them away.’

  Mr Blumen laid a gentle hand upon the corner of the chimney-piece. For an instant their ashen wax-like lids descended over his green-grey eyes.

  ‘And now,’ went on his visitor gently, rising to his feet, ‘that last taxi-cab has passed out of hearing. There is more than half a moon to-night over Whinnimoor. It is time for us to be off.’

  SASURAT

  The soft white glare of snow fringed the crests of the mountains that surrounded the tortuous valley beneath them. Blossoming trees and coloured drifts of flowers mounted up almost to their frozen margin. The sun ascending into the dark blue vault of the sky, though it was but an hour or two after break of day, cast beams so fierce upon their flanks that the lawn-like mists were already swirling in the heat, showering their dew on leaf and flower and rock.

  St Dusman had made his way into the valley in the small hours, and now sat drowsing on a stone beside which roared a torrent of green water. He had removed his sandals in order to lave his feet in the coldness, and now it would appear as if every flame-plumed bird in the thickets around him, and every puffing breath of wind that came wandering across the precipitous gorges, were inviting the spirit of the old man to return to the world, to slip out of sleep and waken again. With mouth agape, however, he nodded on. Flies and butterflies of innumerable dyes flashed and fluttered in the empty air around him. Fish of hardly less brave a livery sported with fin and tail over the coloured stones that tessellated the bed of the stream that flowed beside him.

  Two or three hundred feet above, at the foot of one of the lower peaks glittering in the sunrays with rainbow flashes from its exposed face of rock and quartz, a mountain leopard now stole into view, lifting its gentle head into the sunshine. With twitching brows and whiskers, it sniffed the morning air, while its amber eyes rested for a moment upon the stooping figure of the old man crouched up and motionless in sleep far beneath him. With a faint uneasy mew, it then lifted its gaze upwards towards a pair of eagles circling in the enormous cavity of the now starless heavens. Then curling its narrow beautiful body upon the sward under the rocky wall of the mountain, it couched with head on paws, and composed itself to sleep.

  It was the scream of a parrakeet that pierced through the old man’s dreams at last. His eyes opened, he raised his head and looked around him. Where all had been dark with the gloom of night was now radiant with day. He rose to his feet and shuffled towards a huge spreading tree from amid whose swaying branches of
foliage, almost brushing the ground beneath them with their blooms, he could wait and watch unseen. Resting his hand upon a smooth bough of the tree a little above his head, he contemplated the scene around him.

  A smile spread over his seamed, weather-worn old face as his eyes roved to and fro. For twenty or thirty paces distant from him on a smooth drift of sward stood, as it were, a low small arbour woven of dried grass and rushes, and roofed with patches of moss and coloured feathers even. No bigger than a beehive though it was, it showed as conspicuous on the turf as a green oasis in the wilderness, or an isle of coral rising gently with its palms and tamarisks from out of the sea.

  Some small creature, it was evident, had diligently collected together for its pleasure a few of the more sparkling and garish objects that lay within reach – muscous growths, for example, that flourished only in the denser and darker thickets of the surrounding forest, the bark of a silvery shrub that ventured nearest of all on the hilltops to the never melting snows, a fossil shell or two. While scattered about the rounded entrance to the arbour lay bright pebbles, bright ‘everlasting’ flowers, scraps of quartz, and what appeared to be flakes of a shining metal.

  The old man sighed, though he did not stop smiling, as he feasted himself on these simple artifices and awaited the appearance of the hidden designer. The hours of eternity are no longer than those of time. Contrariwise, a century of earth’s seasons may be in thought but as transitory as the colours of a rainbow. But, whatever his ruminations might be, St Dusman made no attempt to suppress the look of humorous compassion that now wrinkled his face at this showing of yet another renewed attempt to make a haven in the wilderness.

  He had not very long to wait. For sunbeams had but just gilded the fringe of the water in its cold rocky channel, when there came a sudden scurry of wings from above his sheltering tree, and there alit on the very stone that had been his nocturnal stool, a bird.