Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘I stayed on with Bysshe for an hour or two, but though most of the time we sat in silence, like confederates awaiting their crucial moment, nothing happened. A sort of absentness, a slight frown, had settled on his face. And when at last I hurried off to keep some stupid appointment, I might have guessed it was not merely to hear a parrot swear that he had pressed me to come. Afterwards, he was less eager to share his enchantress.’

  ‘The voice, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Can you imagine the voice of the angel in the Leonardo Madonna? – Oh well, never mind that now. A few weeks afterwards Bysshe looked me up again, and for a while we talked aimlessly and at random. He was obviously waiting for me to question him.

  ‘“Oh, by the way, how much did you get?” I enquired at last. He looked absolutely dead beat, his skin was a kind of muddy grey. It appeared that the tiny motif of my experience had been a mere prelude. Bysshe, it seems, had awakened a week or two after my visit in the very earliest of the morning, at the very moment when from underneath the parrot’s pall had slipped solemnly out the complete aria. The words were not actually French, for he had detected something like “alone” and “grief”. But here and there they had a slight nasal timbre, and Bysshe, drinking the fatal music in, lying there in his striped pyjamas still a little dazed with sleep, had simply succumbed.

  ‘He had succumbed to such a degree that his sole preposterous object in life now seemed to be that of tracing the bird’s ownership. Not his sole object, rather; for at every return from this preposterous quest, he spent hours in solitude, bent on the equally vain aim of discovering which in the divine order of things had come first: the invective or the charm. He had some notion that it mattered.

  ‘There is a bit, you remember, in one of Conrad’s novels about a voice – Lena’s. There is another bit in Shakespeare, and in Coleridge; in almost every poet, of course – but it doesn’t matter. Four notes had been enough for me. And even if Melba in her dreams delights the listening shades on the borders of Paradise – even they will not have heard the best that earth can do. You see there was nothing bird-like in the parrot’s piece, except the purity. It was the voice of a seraph, the voice of a marvellous fiddle (that bit of solo, for example, in Mozart’s Minuet in E flat). A voice innocent of the meaning – even of the degree – of its longing; innocent, I mean, of realizing that life can’t really stand – if it could comprehend it – anything so abjectly beautiful as all that; that there’s a breaking-point.

  ‘It’s difficult even to suggest the effect. Absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world a cousin of mine once told me he had ever seen was from the top of a bus. He happened to glance into the dusk of an upper room through an open window, and a naked girl stood there, her eyes looking inward in a remote dream, her shift lifted a little above her small lovely head, as she was about to put it on. Well I suppose Bysshe’s experience resembled that. But there; I, mind you, heard only four notes of it. And now there are no more to come. And my cousin, lost in stupefaction or remorse, had kept immovably to his bus.’

  Judy’s sewing lay for a moment idle in her lap; her downcast eyes were fixed on it as if suddenly it had presented her with an insoluble problem.

  ‘But there was, of course, quite another – a farcical – side to the comedy,’ Tressider pushed on. ‘Poor Bysshe’s pursuit proved as ludicrous as it looks amusing. When you come to think of it, you know, we make our own idols. A silence, a still look of the eyes, a crammed instant of oblivion, and we are what’s called “in love”. What Stendhal calls crystallization, doesn’t he? Queer. But it’s the same in everything. Not merely sex, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what happened to Bysshe.

  ‘Those slowish internal creatures crystallize hardest, perhaps. Out of this lost wandering voice he made – well, he embodied it. And the result wasn’t in the least like poor Minnie. There was no particular tragedy in that. For Bysshe, that is. But, just like him, he tried, as I say, to track the embodiment down. And how could he tell which he’d unearth first – angel or devil. Or – both together. Think of that. Anyhow, he completely failed. First, of course, he returned to the dealer in livestock, who extorted from him a larger sum than he had paid for the parrot, as a bribe to disclose where it had come from. After which Bysshe had at once hied off to a cornchandler’s at Leytonstone – a talkative man.

  ‘This man had bought the bird from a customer to whom he sold weekly supplies of chicken-food and canary-seed – a maiden lady in a semi-detached villa neatly matted with ampelopsis Veitchi.’

  ‘How nice!’ said Judy in a hushed little voice – as if absent-mindedly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tressider. ‘When Bysshe at last asked her outright if the bird had ever talked while it was in her possession, a pink flush had spread over her face. She had herself tried to teach it, she told him, looking down her nose the while beneath her large gold-rimmed glasses: just “scratch-a-poll” or something of that kind. But she had failed. A seafaring nephew of some little naïvety, I should imagine. He had, she fancied, “picked it up” in Portsmouth.

  ‘“It talks a little now” Bysshe had confided to her.

  ‘And the lady had at once given her case away by retaliating that what it might do in the small hours, or with only a gentleman present, was no concern of hers.

  ‘Then Bysshe asked if the parrot had ever engaged in song – “like a bullfinch, you know”. And the lady’s expression implied that his question had confirmed her suspicions of his sanity.

  ‘Portsmouth turned out another bad egg. He tracked down the shop, but the proprietor had died of dropsy a week before. Still, his daughter confessed that if the parrot was the parrot she had in mind – though she had never heard it talking in particular – then it may have been resident in the shop for something under a year. At this a ray of hope struck down on the squalid scene, and Bysshe enquired if the late proprietor had ever indulged in “musical evenings”.

  ‘There was a young lady living not many doors down the street, he was informed, who taught the pianoforte, and who led a Mixed Methodist Choir. Bysshe had accordingly spent the greater part of that evening beneath the young lady’s lighted window – providentially an inch or two ajar – while in successive keys she practised her scales. And for bonne bouche she had at last rewarded the eavesdropper with a rendering of “Hold the Fort”; but, alas, in tones of a pitch and volume which no mere mimic, feathered or otherwise, could hope to recapture.

  ‘Bysshe could get no further for the present. As I say, he never did. His parrot’s past had proved irrevocable. And apart from the hint of the prehistoric in all its species, even the age of this particular specimen remained a mystery. Destiny may, of course, have seduced it to that slum in Portsmouth from the Islands of the Blest. That would, at any rate, account for the critical side of its repertory. It may have taken flight clean out of a fairy-tale, leaving its rarer colours behind it. So at least one can imagine Snow-white singing over her bed-making in the house of the dwarfs. It may have had Belial for owner and then St Lucy; or vice versa. It may have been a fallen Parrot. But it doesn’t matter.

  ‘The only point worth bothering about is that Bysshe couldn’t get its original out of his head – the original he had invented, I mean. Parrots don’t learn to sing or to swear in an afternoon. Positive months of intercourse must have been necessary even for a fowl as intelligent as that. And so, poor Bysshe lived in constant torture. Where was she now – this impossible She? And where and whose the tongue that seemed to be vocal of the very rot to which all things living in this delightful world are – well – doomed, you know?

  ‘Anyhow, Bysshe gave up the quest; and lived on in a furious, implacable dream. The one thing he couldn’t do was to exorcize this ghost in him. He shut himself up in his chambers for days together, and the autumnal evenings rapidly lengthened. He existed in a condition of abject nausea of expectation; and in as abject a terror of having that expectation fulfilled. Nothing on earth would cajole or intimidate the bird, though Bysshe cursed
it at one moment and at the next lavished upon it all the spices of the East. Cajoled it, I mean, to the extent of persuading it to embark on its programme unless the spirit moved it.

  ‘It’s an almost tragic thought too – for his loathing of the parrot now exceeded all bounds – that, far from returning these sentiments, the creature seemed to have fallen head over ears in love with his keeper. It would squat on its perch, muttering inarticulate endearments, or, sidling stealthily with beak and claw from base to keystone of its dome-shaped cage, would ogle him with an eye as amorous and amiable as the dumb thing could make it. And only dumb things of course can ever really be in love. There’s a genuine pathos there, though Bysshe was immune to it.

  ‘And now, when the old black Stygian flood set in anew, the bird no longer swore at him; it swore with him. And it so dispersed its favours that Bysshe up to the very last was never able to settle with any certainty which part of its programme came first – the paradisal aria or the other. You couldn’t anticipate the creature. It chose its own moments – and these invariably unexpected. When gigantic storm-clouds were heaping themselves above the hill of the Strand, out of that menacing hush its amazing incantation would steal upon the air. In the balmiest hours of St Martin’s summer, Bysshe would hurriedly spring to his windows to cut off the foul stream that came sliding out of that minute throat like the sluggish lees of a volcanic eruption.

  ‘It was no good. You can’t pin down human nature. Luckily Bysshe did not depend on his ship-broking. If he had, his parrot would have put him in the Workhouse. It’s bad enough, so I am told, to fall in love with the tangible, with a creature owning a heart that you can at least believe in, or besiege, or at times hope to break. But to be infatuated by a second-hand voice and to share its decoy with the company of a friend possessing a tongue that might shock Beelzebub himself – well, that, I gather, is an even less pleasant experience.’

  Judy raised the hand that held her sewing, and gently rubbed her left cheek. The air was close in spite of the open window, and in spite of the cool-looking vaporous moonlight in which Stella continued to sit and soak. But neither seemed inclined to interrupt the interminable yarn. Indeed Tressider himself appeared to have grown a little tired of it. He half yawned.

  ‘There was nothing, you know,’ he began again, with a more pronounced drawl in his voice; ‘there was nothing of course extremely exceptional in Bysshe’s parrot’s powers, except possibly the collusion. There are numbers of historical parrots with a comparable repertory. There was the parrot for example, perfectly well accredited, that could recite a whole sonnet of Petrarch’s. There is the Grand Khan’s notorious cockatoo – though that was made of metal and precious stones. In France there are parrots that can reel off pages at a time of the academic dictionary. And there was the macaw that Luther despatched with his translation of the Bible. I’ll bet, too, Catherine Parr had a parrot – with a five-stringed lute. Whether or not; the rest is silence.

  ‘Minnie Sturgess naturally enough, poor thing, had been restless for weeks. The game in which she had never held any really decent cards she now saw slipping into fatuity. Bysshe was possessed. The assurance of that poisoned the very air she breathed. But possessed by what? By whom? She played on for a while, none the less, with all the courage and the skill she could muster. Bysshe indeed was even taking a tonic of her prescription – some patent food or other, when I saw him again towards the end of October. It didn’t appear to be doing him much good. Knowing as I did the cause of this vacant somnambulism – that furtive vigilant stare of his as if from some living creature hiding far back in his eyes – the desperate change in his looks was almost ridiculous.

  ‘“Why don’t you drown the wretched thing?” I asked him. “It’s a machine – an automaton: and half-devilish at that.” But the face he lifted to me, its ears almost visibly pricked up towards the lair of his seducer, was – well, I suppose you know what unrequited passion can make of a man.’

  ‘You really mean,’ cried Judy suddenly, needle in the air, ‘you really mean he was wasting away for the ghost of a voice?’

  Tressider looked at her across the room. Even a stranger would have noticed the peculiar stridency of her shocked tones. Its bells were out of tune. To judge from Tressider’s face, the telling of his story had tired him a good deal.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘things do happen like that. Though no doubt, as with John Keats, some “morbid affection” helped. What are we all but ghosts – of something? And who’s telling this story for you, pray, but your ghost of me? All it comes to is that Bysshe kept on feeding his imagination, and the effort wore him down.’

  ‘“Morbid affection!” ‘echoed Stella. ‘Why drag in the mortuary?’

  ‘And what,’ gasped Judy, ‘and what did Miss Sturgess do? Finally, I mean? And apart’ (and she added the words almost with a touch of bravado) ‘apart from the food, or patent medicine, or whatever it was?’

  ‘Miss Sturgess?’ Tressider echoed. ‘She played her last card; and it was a poor card, played like that. You see, poor thing, her only possible hope was to discover somehow exactly how she stood, since Bysshe had become little but a sullen recluse. She scarcely saw him now, even though so far as I can tell, there had been no open rift or quarrel between them. One may assume she had been awaiting her opportunity; and I’m not attacking her intentions. And one evening – and, mind you, as the colder weather approached, and possibly because Bysshe (though he lavished other kinds of dainties on his parrot) was incapable of showing it any spiritual sympathy, the creature was growing more and more stagnant and morose – well, one evening he had slipped out to fetch himself, I think, a bottle of wine. He was sinking into a sheer inertia – from being goaded on and on. And while on this errand he seems to have had some kind of fainting attack. Not the first of the kind. This had entailed his sitting for half an hour or so in the nearest pub; for in these later days of his obsession he had practically given up venturing further afield. All told, he couldn’t have been more than an hour away.

  ‘When he returned Minnie Sturgess was standing by the window in the further corner of his room. There was still a trace of twilight in the sky and it illumined her set face near the glass. And something in that or in her attitude set him shivering. He asked her what was wrong; then noticed that her left hand was bound up, and very inadequately, with a handkerchief – one of his own.

  ‘She merely turned her head – and a stony one it must have appeared, I should imagine – and looked at him. He managed to repeat his question. He asked her what was the matter. I gathered that she didn’t say very much in reply, only something to the effect that in future so far as she was concerned Bysshe was entirely at liberty to enjoy the delights of the company he had chosen, and which for some time past he had evidently preferred to hers. And that now at any rate he would no longer be taunted regarding it when it wasn’t there. She had a raucous voice, and it was, I gathered, a bit of feminine sarcasm; something like that.

  ‘And Bysshe knew pretty well what it meant. He knew that his voices, devilish and seraphic, were now for ever silent: that their murderess was there. He sat down without answering. Mad dogs’ teeth are notoriously dangerous, Miss Sturgess went on to remark; did Bysshe know if parrots’ were? And still, I gathered, he made no reply. He just sat there, paying no attention, as if almost he had taken lessons in endurance from his late pet.

  ‘And then, his friend seems to have walked – or so at least I see her – in a kind of prowling semicircle round him, with eyes fixed on his face, and so out of the door. And then down the echoing shallow wooden staircase, and into the cobbled courtyard, and under the thinning plane-tree, and out into London – en route, at last, poor soul, for the boarding-house in Ramsgate.’

  ‘And where did Bysshe bury the thing?’ inquired Stella, as if sick to death of being satirical.

  ‘I never asked him that,’ said Tressider calmly. ‘Nor, so far as I have heard, did he ever catechize the desolate one regarding which precise
item of the two counts of the indictment had induced her to wring the parrot’s neck. Probably the bel canto, for I don’t believe myself that a woman much cares what company the man she is in love with keeps provided that it is not too good for her.’

  At this, apparently, Judy had sat bolt upright in her chair, as if in sudden fear or anxiety. And at that precise moment heavyish footsteps were heard without.

  ‘Hello,’ inquired a bass, unctuous, yet hardly good-humoured voice, ‘when shall you three meet again?’

  It was Bill who stood in the doorway – Bill in his ineffable dinner-jacket and glossy shirt. And he all but filled it. He might almost have been a balloon, this Bill – tethered to the carpet there by his glossy patent-leather shoes – buoyant with gas.

  ‘He has been telling us a story about a parrot,’ said Judy in a low voice, ‘who used very bad language.’

  ‘Has he?’ said Bill. ‘Well, he ought to know better.’ But his eye was almost as vacant as that of Bysshe’s pet. It wandered off to rest on Judy’s other guest, Stella. ‘And what did you think of it?’ he said; ‘the bad man’s tale?’

  ‘Why,’ said Stella, ‘I am a little too grown-up for fairy-tales. And as for morals; I can find my own.’

  ‘And you, Badroulbadour?’ said Bill, widely smiling at his wife.

  ‘Me, Bill,’ echoed Judy firmly, her pretty cheeks flushed after her exertions. ‘Why, I have been thinking that the tiny creature who’s going to wear this shirt has ventured into a rather difficult world.’

  ‘And who, may I ask, is the “tiny creature”?’ drawled her husband, almost as though such a question could be a sarcasm.

  Tressider’s gaze was fixed vacantly on the scrap of sewing. He appeared to be entirely aloof from this little domestic catechism – seemed to have lost interest in the evening.