Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘So far, so good, sir. We stop when we can go no further. Vengeance. But of their power, of what they can do, I can give you definite evidences. It would be a byword if once the rumour was spread abroad. And if it is not so, why, I ask, does every expert that comes here leave us in haste and in dismay? They go off with their tails between their legs. They see, they grope in, but they don’t believe. They invent reasons. And they hasten to leave us!’ His face shook with the emphasis he laid upon the word. ‘Why? Why, because the experience is beyond their knowledge, sir.’ He drew back breathless and, as I could see, profoundly moved.

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘every old building is bound in time to show symptoms of decay. Half the cathedrals in England, half its churches, even, of any age, have been “restored” – and in many cases with ghastly results. This new grouting and so on. Why, only the other day … All I mean is, why should you suppose mere wear and tear should be caused by any other agency than —’

  The old man turned away. ‘I must apologize,’ he interrupted me with his inimitable admixture of modesty and dignity. ‘I am a poor mouth at explanations, sir. Decay – stress – strain – settling – dissolution: I have heard those words bandied from lip to lip like a game at cup and ball. They fill me with nausea. Why, I am speaking not of dissolution, sir, but of repairs, restorations. Not decay, strengthening. Not a corroding loss, an awful progress. I could show you places – and chiefly obscured from direct view and difficult of a close examination, sir, where stones lately as rotten as pumice and as fretted as a sponge have been replaced by others fresh-quarried – and nothing of their kind within twenty miles.

  ‘There are spots where massive blocks a yard or more square have been pushed into place by sheer force. All Hallows is safer at this moment than it has been for three hundred years. They meant well – them who came to see, full of talk and fine language, and went dumb away. I grant you they meant well. I allow that. They hummed and they hawed. They smirked this and they shrugged that. But at heart, sir, they were cowed – horrified: all at a loss. Their very faces showed it. But if you ask me for what purpose such doings are afoot – I have no answer; none.

  ‘But now, supposing you yourself, sir, were one of them, with your repute at stake, and you were called in to look at a house which the owners of it and them who had it in trust were disturbed by its being re-edificated and restored by some agency unknown to them. Supposing that! Why,’ and he rapped with his knuckles on the table, ‘being human and not one of us mightn’t you be going away too with mouth shut, because you didn’t want to get talked about to your disadvantage? And wouldn’t you at last dismiss the whole thing as a foolish delusion, in the belief that living in out-of-the-way parts like these cuts a man off from the world, breeds maggots in the mind?

  ‘I assure you, sir, they don’t – not even Canon Ockham himself to the full – they don’t believe even me. And yet, when they have their meetings of the Chapter they talk and wrangle round and round about nothing else. I can bear the other without a murmur. What God sends, I say, we humans deserve. We have laid ourselves open to it. But when you buttress up blindness and wickedness with downright folly, why then, sir, I sometimes fear for my own reason.’

  He set his shoulders as square as his aged frame would permit, and with fingers clutching the lapels beneath his chin, he stood gazing out into the darkness through that narrow inward window.

  ‘Ah, sir,’ he began again, ‘I have not spent sixty years in this solitary place without paying heed to my own small wandering thoughts and instincts. Look at your newspapers, sir. What they call the Great War is over – and he’d be a brave man who would take an oath before heaven that that was only of human designing – and yet what do we see around us? Nothing but strife and juggleries and hatred and contempt and discord wherever you look. I am no scholar, sir, but so far as my knowledge and experience carry me, we human beings are living to-day merely from hand to mouth. We learn to-day what ought to have been done yesterday, and yet are at a loss to know what’s to be done to-morrow.

  ‘And the Church, sir. God forbid I should push my way into what does not concern me; and if you had told me half an hour gone by that you were a regular churchman, I shouldn’t be pouring out all this to you now. It wouldn’t be seemly. But being not so gives me confidence. By merely listening you can help me, sir; though you can’t help us. Centuries ago – and in my humble judgement, rightly – we broke away from the parent stem and rooted outselves in our own soil. But, right or wrong, doesn’t that of itself, I ask you, make us all the more open to attack from him who never wearies in going to and fro in the world seeking whom he may devour?

  ‘I am not wishing you to take sides. But a gentleman doesn’t scoff; you don’t find him jeering at what he doesn’t rightly understand. He keeps his own counsel, sir. And that’s where, as I say, Canon Leigh Shougar sets me doubting. He refuses to make allowances; though up there in London things may look different. He gets his company there; and then for him the whole kallyidoscope changes, if you take me.’

  The old man scanned me an instant as if inquiring within himself whether, after all, I too might not be one of the outcasts. ‘You see, sir,’ he went on dejectedly, ‘I can bear what may be to come. I can, if need be, live on through what few years may yet remain to me and keep going, as they say. But only if I can be assured that my own inmost senses are not cheating and misleading me. Tell me the worst, and you will have done an old man a service he can never repay. Tell me, on the other hand, that I am merely groping along in a network of devilish delusion, sir – well, in that case I hope to with my master, with Dr Pomfrey, as soon as possible. We were all children once; and now there’s nothing worse in this world for him to come into, in a manner of speaking.

  ‘Oh, sir, I sometimes wonder if what we call childhood and growing up isn’t a copy of the fate of our ancient forefathers. In the beginning of time there were Fallen Angels, we are told; but even if it weren’t there in Holy Writ, we might have learnt it of our own fears and misgivings. I sometimes find myself looking at a young child with little short of awe, sir, knowing that within its mind is a scene of peace and paradise of which we older folk have no notion, and which will fade away out of it, as life wears on, like the mere tabernacling of a dream.’

  There was no trace of unction in his speech, though the phraseology might suggest it, and he smiled at me as if in reassurance. ‘You see, sir – if I have any true notion of the matter – then I say, heaven is dealing very gently with Dr Pomfrey. He has gone back, and, I take it, his soul is elsewhere and at rest.’

  He had come a pace or two nearer, and the candle-light now cast grotesque shadows in the hollows of his brows and cheekbones, silvering his long scanty hair. The eyes, dimming with age, were fixed on mine as if in incommunicable entreaty. I was at a loss to answer him.

  He dropped his hands to his sides. ‘The fact is,’ he looked cautiously about him, ‘what I am now being so bold as to suggest, though it’s a familiar enough experience to me, may put you in actual physical danger. But then, duty’s duty, and a deed of kindness from stranger to stranger quite another matter. You seem to have come, if I may say so, in the nick of time; that was all. On the other hand, we can leave the building at once if you are so minded. In any case we must be gone well before dark sets in; even mere human beings are best not disturbed at any night-work they may be after. The dark brings recklessness: conscience cannot see as clear in the dark. Besides, I once delayed too long myself. There is not much of day left even now, though I see by the almanac there should be a slip of moon tonight – unless the sky is over-clouded. All that I’m meaning is that our all-in-all, so to speak, is the calm untrammelled evidence of the outer senses, sir. And there comes a time when – well, when one hesitates to trust one’s own.’

  I have read somewhere that it is only its setting – the shape, the line, the fold, the angle of the lid and so on – that gives its finer shades of meaning and significance to the human eye. Looking in
to his, even in that narrow and melancholy light, was like pondering over a grey, salt, desolate pool – such as sometimes neighbours the sea on a flat and dangerous coast.

  Perhaps if I had been a little less credulous, or less exhausted, I should by now have begun to doubt this old creature’s sanity. And yet, surely, at even the faintest contact with the insane, a sentinel in the mind sends up flares and warnings; the very landscape changes; there is a sense of insecurity. If, too, the characters inscribed by age and experience on a man’s face can be evidence of goodness and simplicity, then my companion was safe enough. To trust in his sagacity was another matter.

  But then, there was All Hallows itself to take into account. That first glimpse from my green headland of its louring yet lovely walls had been strangely moving. There are buildings (almost as though they were once copies of originals now half-forgotten in the human mind) that have a singular influence on the imagination. Even now in this remote candlelit room, immured between its massive stones, the vast edifice seemed to be gently and furtively fretting its impression on my mind.

  I glanced again at the old man: he had turned aside as if to leave me, unbiased, to my own decision. How would a lifetime spent between these sombre walls have affected me, I wondered? Surely it would be an act of mere decency to indulge their worn-out hermit! He had appealed to me. If I were ten times more reluctant to follow him, I could hardly refuse. Not at any rate without risking a retreat as humiliating as that of the architectural experts he had referred to – with my tail between my legs.

  ‘I only wish I could hope to be of any real help.’

  He turned about; his expression changed, as if at the coming of a light. ‘Why, then, sir, let us be gone at once. You are with me, sir: that was all I hoped and asked. And now there’s no time to waste.’

  He tilted his head to listen a moment – with that large, flat, shell-like ear of his which age alone seems to produce. ‘Matches and candle, sir,’ he had lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘but – though we mustn’t lose each other; you and me, I mean – not, I think, a naked light. What I would suggest, if you have no objection, is your kindly grasping my gown. There is a kind of streamer here, you see – as if made for the purpose. There will be a good deal of up-and-downing, but I know the building blindfold and as you might say inch by inch. And now that the bell-ringers have given up ringing it is more in my charge than ever.’

  He stood back and looked at me with folded hands, a whimsical childlike smile on his aged face. ‘I sometimes think to myself I’m like the sentry, sir, in that play by William Shakespeare. I saw it, sir, years ago, on my only visit to London – when I was a boy. If ever there were a villain for all his fine talk and all, commend me to that ghost. I see him yet.’

  Whisper though it was, a sort of chirrup had come into his voice, like that of a cricket in a baker’s shop. I took tight hold of the velveted tag of his gown. He opened the door, pressed the box of safety matches into my hand, himself grasped the candlestick and then blew out the light. We were instantly marooned in an impenetrable darkness. ‘Now, sir, if you would kindly remove your walking shoes,’ he muttered close in my ear, ‘we should proceed with less noise. I shan’t hurry you. And please to tug at the streamer if you need attention. In a few minutes the blackness will be less intense.’

  As I stooped down to loose my shoe-laces I heard my heart thumping merrily away. It had been listening to our conversation apparently! I slung my shoes round my neck – as I had often done as a boy when going paddling – and we set out on our expedition.

  I have endured too often the nightmare of being lost and abandoned in the stony bowels of some strange and prodigious building to take such an adventure lightly. I clung, I confess, desperately tight to my lifeline and we groped steadily onward – my guide ever and again turning back to mutter warning or encouragement in my ear.

  Now I found myself steadily ascending; and then in a while, feeling my way down flights of hollowly worn stone steps, and anon brushing along a gallery or corkscrewing up a newel staircase so narrow that my shoulders all but touched the walls on either side. In spite of the sepulchral chill in these bowels of the cathedral, I was soon suffocatingly hot, and the effort to see became intolerably fatiguing. Once, to recover our breath we paused opposite a slit in the thickness of the masonry, at which to breathe the tepid sweetness of the outer air. It was faint with the scent of wild flowers and cool of the sea. And presently after, at a barred window, high overhead, I caught a glimpse of the night’s first stars.

  We then turned inward once more, ascending yet another spiral staircase. And now the intense darkness had thinned a little, the groined roof above us becoming faintly discernible. A fresher air softly fanned my cheek; and then trembling fingers groped over my breast, and, cold and bony, clutched my own.

  ‘Dead still here, sir, if you please.’ So close sounded the whispered syllables the voice might have been a messenger’s within my own consciousness. ‘Dead still, here. There’s a drop of some sixty or seventy feet a few paces on.’

  I peered out across the abyss, conscious, as it seemed, of the huge superincumbent weight of the noble fretted roof only a small space now immediately above our heads. As we approached the edge of this stony precipice, the gloom paled a little, and I guessed that we must be standing in some coign of the southern transept, for what light the evening skies now afforded was clearer towards the right. On the other hand, it seemed the northern windows opposite us were most of them boarded up, or obscured in some fashion. Gazing out, I could detect scaffolding poles – like knitting needles – thrust out from the walls and a balloon-like spread of canvas above them. For the moment my ear was haunted by what appeared to be the droning of an immense insect. But this presently ceased. I fancy it was internal only.

  ‘You will understand, sir,’ breathed the old man close beside me – and we still stood, grotesquely enough, hand in hand – ‘the scaffolding over there has been in position a good many months now. It was put up when the last gentleman came down from London to inspect the fabric. And there it’s been left ever since. Now, sir! – though I implore you to be cautious.’

  I hardly needed the warning. With one hand clutching my box of matches, the fingers of the other interlaced with my companion’s, I strained every sense. And yet I could detect not the faintest stir or murmur under that wide-spreading roof. Only a hush as profound as that which must reign in the Royal Chamber of the pyramid of Cheops faintly swirled in the labyrinths of my ear.

  How long we stayed in this position I cannot say; but minutes sometimes seem like hours. And then, suddenly, without the slightest warning, I became aware of a peculiar and incessant vibration. It is impossible to give a name to it. It suggested the remote whirring of an enormous mill-stone, or that – though without definite pulsation – of revolving wings, or even the spinning of an immense top.

  In spite of his age, my companion apparently had ears as acute as mine. He had clutched me tighter a full ten seconds before I myself became aware of this disturbance of the air. He pressed closer. ‘Do you see that, sir?’

  I gazed and gazed, and saw nothing. Indeed even in what I had seemed to hear I might have been deceived. Nothing is more treacherous in certain circumstances – except possibly the eye – than the ear. It magnifies, distorts, and may even invent. As instantaneously as I had become aware of it, the murmur had ceased. And then – though I cannot be certain – it seemed the dingy and voluminous spread of canvas over there had perceptibly trembled, as if a huge cautious hand had been thrust out to draw it aside. No time was given me to make sure. The old man had hastily withdrawn me into the opening of the wall through which we had issued; and we made no pause in our retreat until we had come again to the narrow slit of window which I have spoken of and could refresh ourselves with a less stagnant air. We stood here resting awhile.

  ‘Well, sir?’ he inquired at last, in the same flat muffled tones.

  ‘Do you ever pass along here alone?’ I whisper
ed. ‘Oh, yes, sir. I make it a habit to be the last to leave – and often the first to come; but I am usually gone by this hour.’

  I looked close at the dim face in profile against that narrow oblong of night. ‘It is so difficult to be sure of oneself,’ I said. ‘Have you ever actually encountered anything – near at hand, I mean?’

  ‘I keep a sharp look-out, sir. Maybe they don’t think me of enough importance to molest – the last rat, as they say.’

  ‘But have you?’ – I might myself have been communicating with the phantasmal genius loci of All Hallows – our muffled voices; this intense caution and secret listening; the slight breathlessness, as if at any instant one’s heart were ready for flight: ‘But have you?’

  ‘Well yes, sir,’ he said. ‘And in this very gallery. They nearly had me, sir. But by good fortune there’s a recess a little further on – stored up with some old fragments of carving, from the original building, sixth-century, so it’s said: stone-capitals, heads and hands, and suchlike. I had had my warning, and managed to leap in there and conceal myself. But only just in time. Indeed, sir, I confess I was in such a condition of terror and horror I turned my back.’

  ‘You mean you heard, but didn’t look? And – something came?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I seemed to be reduced to no bigger than a child, huddled up there in that corner. There was a sound like clanging metal – but I don’t think it was metal. It drew near at a furious speed, then passed me, making a filthy gust of wind. For some instants I couldn’t breathe; the air was gone.’

  ‘And no other sound?’

  ‘No other, sir, except out of the distance a noise like the sounding of a stupendous kind of gibberish. A calling; or so it seemed – no human sound. The air shook with it. You see, sir, I myself wasn’t of any consequence, I take it – unless a mere obstruction in the way. But – I have heard it said somewhere that the rarity of these happenings is only because it’s a pain and torment and not any sort of pleasure for such beings, such apparitions, sir, good or bad, to visit our outward world. That’s what I have heard said; though I can go no further.