Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

As now at this moment, she had been alone in that kitchen, even though the children were there. And alone as she had never been before. It seemed as though she had come to the end of things – a vacant abyss. Her husband had gone on to his work after having been with her to the doctor. She remembered that doctor – a taciturn, wide-faced man, who had listened to her symptoms without the least change of countenance, just steadily fixing his grey eyes on her face. Still, however piercing their attention, and whatever the symptoms, they could only have guessed at the horror within.

  And then her husband had brought her home again, and after consoling her as best he could, had gone off late and anxious to his work, leaving her in utter despair. She must go away at once into the country, the doctor had said, and go away without company: must leave everything and rest. Rest! She had hated the very thought of the country: its green fields, its living things, and the long days and evenings with nothing to do; and then the nights! Even though a farm was the very place in the world she would have wished to have been born in, to live in, and there to die, she would be more than ever at the mercy there of those horrors within. And country people can stare and pry, too. They despise Londoners.

  The extraordinary thing was that though her husband had reeled off to the doctor, as if he had learned it all by heart, as if he wanted to get rid of it once and for all, the long list of her symptoms, the one worst symptom of them all he had never had the faintest glimpse of. His pale face, that queer frown between his eyebrows and the odd uncertain way in which he had moved his mouth as he was speaking, though they showed that he was talking by rote – or, rather, talking just as men do, with the one idea of making himself clear and business-like, were yet proof too of what he was feeling. But not a single word he had said had touched her inmost secret. He hadn’t an inkling that her awful state, body and soul, was centred on him.

  She could smile to herself now to think what contortions the body may twist itself into when anything goes wrong in the mind. That detestation of food, those dizzying moments when you twirl helplessly on a kind of vacant devilish merry-go-round; that repetition of one thought on and on like a rat in a cage; those forebodings rising up one after the other like clouds out of the sea in an Arabian tale. Why, she had had symptoms enough for every patent medicine there was. She smiled again at thought of her portrait appearing in the advertisements in the newspapers for pills and tonics, her hand clutching the small of her back, or clamped over a knotted forehead.

  Still, though she quite agreed now, and had almost agreed then, that it had been wise to see the doctor, and though she agreed now beyond all telling that she owed him what was infinitely more precious even than life itself; still she hadn’t breathed to her husband one word about that dream; not a word. And never would. Not even if she lay dying, and if its living horror came to her then again – though it never would – in the hope of crushing her once for all, utterly and for ever.

  It was something no one could tell to anybody. There were vile things enough in the world for every one to read and share, but this was one not even a newspaper could print, simply because she supposed no one could realize except herself how abject, how unendurable it was. Perhaps this was because it was a dream, she wondered. Dreams are more terrible than anything that happens in the day, in the real world.

  A gentle quietude had descended upon her face lit up by the firelight there. It was as if the very thought of a dream had endued it with the expression of sleep. Nor, of course, was there anything to harm her now. This was yet another mystery concerning the life one’s spirit lives in a dream, in sleep. The worst of haunting dreams may lose not only its poison, its horror, it may even lose its meaning, just as dreams of happiness and peace, in the glare and noise of day, may lose the secret of their beauty. Not that this particular dream had ever lost its meaning. It had kept its meaning, though what came after had completely changed it – turned it outside in, so to speak.

  And now, since she was sane and ‘normal’ again, just the mother of her three children, with her work to do, and able to do it – the meanings did not seem really to matter very much. You must just live on, she was thinking to herself, and do all you have to do, and not push about or pierce too much into your hidden mind. Leave it alone; you will be happier so. Griefs come of themselves. They break in like thieves, destroying as they go. No need to seek them out, anticipate them!

  But what a mercy her husband had been the kind of man he was – so patient over those horrible symptoms, so matter-of-fact. It was absurd of the doctor to try to hurry him on, to get testy. Clever people are all very well, but if her husband had been clever or conceited he would have noticed she was keeping something back – might have questioned her. And then she would have been beyond hope – crazy.

  And that, of course, put one face to face with the unanswerable question: was what she had seen real? Was there such a place? Were there such dreadful beings? After all, places you could not see had real existence – think of the vast mountainous forests of the world and the deserts and all their horrors! And perhaps after death? … For a while the white-faced clock on the wall overhead, hanging above the burnished row of kitchen tins, ticked out its seconds, without so much as one further thought passing in her mind. The room was deliciously warm; all the familiar things in it were friendly. This was home. And in an hour or two her husband would return to it; and a little later their three girls: the two fair ones, with the little dark creature – tired probably and a little fretful – between them. And life would begin again.

  She was happy now. But thinking too much was unwise. That had really been at the root of her Uncle Willie’s malady. He could not rest, and then had become hopelessly ‘silly’ – then, his ‘visitors’! What a comfort to pretend for a moment to be like one of those empty jugs on the dresser; or, rather, not quite empty but with a bunch of flowers in one! And a fresh bunch every morning. If you remain empty, ideas come creeping in – as horrible things as the ‘movies’ show; prowling things. And in sleep, too, one’s mind is empty, waiting for dreams to well in. It is always dangerous – leaving doors ajar.

  And so – she had merely come round to the same place once more. But now, and for the first time since that visit to the country, she could afford to face the whole experience. It was surprising how its worst had evaporated. It had begun in the March by her being just ‘out of sorts’, overtired and fretful. But she had got better. And then, while she was going up to bed that night – seven years ago now – her candle had been blown out by a draught from the dark open landing window. Nothing of consequence had happened during the evening. Her husband had been elated by a letter from an old friend of his bachelor days, and she herself had been doing needlework. And yet, this absurd little accident to her candle had resembled the straw too many on the camel’s back.

  It had seemed like an enemy – that puff of wind: as if a spectre had whispered, ‘Try the dark!’ And she had sat down there on the stairs in the gloom and had begun to cry. Without a sound the burning tears had slowly rolled down her cheeks as if from the very depths of her life. ‘So this was the meaning of everything!’ they seemed to tell her. ‘It is high time you were told.’ The fit was quickly over. The cold air at the landing window had soothed her, and in a moment or two she had lit her candle again, and, as if filled with remorse, had looked in on her two sleeping children, and after kissing them, gone on to bed.

  And it was in the middle of that night her dream had come. After stifling in her pillow a few last belated sobs, lest her husband should hear her, she had fallen asleep. And she had dreamed that she was standing alone on the timbers of a kind of immense wharf, beside a wide sluggish stream. There was no moon, and there were no stars, so far as she could remember, in the sky. Yet all around her was faintly visible. The water itself as if of its own slow-moving darkness, seemed to be luminous. She could see that darkness as if by its own light: or rather was conscious of it, as if all around her was taking its light from herself. How absurd!

>   The wharf was built on piles that plunged down into the water and into the slime beneath. There were flights of stone steps on the left, and up there, beyond, loomed what appeared to be immense unwindowed buildings, like warehouses or granaries; but these she could not see very plainly. Confronting her, further down the wharf, and moored to it by a thick rope, floated on the river a huge and empty barge. There was a wrapped figure stooping there, where the sweeps jut out, as if in profound sleep. And above the barge, on the wharf itself, lay a vague irregular mass of what apparently had come out of the barge.

  It was at the spectacle of the mere shape of this foul mass, it seemed, that she had begun to be afraid. It would have horrified her even if she had been alone in the solitude of the wharf – even in the absence of the gigantic apparition-like beings who stood round about it; busy with great shovels, working silently in company. They, she realized, were unaware of her presence. They laboured on, without speech, intent only on their office. And as she watched them — She could not have conceived it was possible to be so solitary and terrified and lost.

  There was no Past in her dream. She stood on this dreadful wharf, beside this soundless and sluggish river under the impenetrable murk of its skies, as if in an eternal Present. And though she could scarcely move for terror, some impulse within impelled her to approach nearer to discover what these angelic yet horrifying shapes were at. And as she drew near enough to them to distinguish the faintly flaming eyes in their faces, and the straight flax-coloured hair upon their heads, even the shape of their enormous shovels, she became aware of yet another presence standing close beside her, more shadowy than they, more closely resembling her own phantom self.

  But though it was beyond her power to turn and confront it, it seemed that by its influence she realized what cargo the barge had been carrying up the stream and had disgorged upon the wharf. It was a heap, sombre and terrific, of a kind of refuse. The horror of this realization shook her even now, as she knelt there, the flames of the kitchen fire lighting up her fair blonde face. For, as if through a whisper in her consciousness from the companion that stood beside her – she knew that this refuse was the souls of men; the souls not of utterly vile and evil men (if such there were; and no knowledge was given to her of where their souls lay or where the blessed) but of ordinary nondescript men – ‘wayfaring men, though fools’. Yet nothing but what seemed to be a sublime indifference to their laborious toil and to its object, showed on the faces of the labourers on the wharf.

  Perhaps if there had been any speech among them, or if any sound – no more earthly than echo in her imagination – of their movements had reached her above the flowing of that vast, dark stealthy stream, and above the scrapings on the timbers of the shovels, almost as large as those used in an oast-house, she would have been less afraid.

  But this unfathomable silence seemed to intensify the gloom as she watched; every object there became darker yet more sharply outlined, so that she could see more clearly, up above, the immense steep-walled warehouses. For now their walls too seemed to afford a gentle luminosity. And one thought only was repeating itself again and again in her mind: The souls, the souls, of men! The souls, the souls, of men!

  And then, beyond human heart to bear, the secret messenger beside her let fall into consciousness another seed of thought. She realized that her poor husband’s soul was there in that vast nondescript heap; and those of loved-ones gone, wayfarers, friends of her childhood, her girlhood, and of those nearer yet, valueless, neglected – being shovelled away by these gigantic, angelic beings. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear,’ she was weeping within. And, as with afflicted lungs and bursting temples she continued to gaze, suddenly out of the nowhere of those skies, two or three angle-winged birds swooped down and alighting in greed nearby, covertly watched the toilers.

  And one, bolder than the rest, scurried forward on scowering wing, and leapt back into the air burdened with its morsel out of that accumulation. The sight of it pierced her being in this eternity as if that morsel were her own. And suddenly one of the shapes, and not an instant too soon, had lifted its shovel, brandishing it on high above his head, with a shrill resounding cry – ‘Harpy!’

  The cry shattered the silence, reverberated on and on, wharf, warehouse, starless arch, and she had awakened: had awakened to her small homely bedroom. It was bathed as if with beauty by the beams of the nightlight that shone on a small table beside her bed where used to sleep her three-year-old. It was safety, assurance, peace; and yet unreal. Unreal even her husband – his simple face perfectly still and strange in sleep – lying quietly beside her. And she – lost amid the gloom of her own mind.

  Tell that dream – never, never! But yet now in this quiet firelight, so many cares over – and, above all, that dreary entanglement of the mind a thing of the past – what alone still kept the dream a secret was not so much its horror, but its shame. The shame not only that she should have dreamed such a dream, but that she should as it were have seen only its horror and should have become its slave.

  To have believed in such a doom; to have supposed that God … But she could afford to smile indulgently now at this weakness and cowardice and infidelity. She could afford it simply because of Mr Simmonds, the farmer. That was the solemn, the really-and-truly amusing truth. It was that rather corpulent, short, red-faced Mr Simmonds who had been responsible for the very happiest moment in her life: who had saved her, had saved far more even than her ‘reason’.

  Her husband, of course, knew how much they owed to his kindness. But he did not know that he owed Mr Simmonds her very heart’s salvation, if that was not a conceited way of putting it. And yet it was this Mr Simmonds – she laughed softly out loud as she gazed on into the fire – it was this Mr Simmonds who had at first sight, in his old brown coat and mud-caked gaiters, reminded her of a potato! Of a potato and then an apple, one of those cobbled apples, their bright red faded a little and the skin drawn up. His smile was like that, as dry as it was sweet, like cider.

  What an interminable Sunday that had been before her husband and the two children had said good-bye to her at the railway station. How that man in spectacles had stared at her over his newspaper. Then the ride in the trap, her roped box behind, and Mrs Simmonds, and the farm. Two or three times a day at least she had rushed out in imagination to drown everything in the looking-glass-like pond among the reeds not very far from the farm. And yet all the time, though Mrs Simmonds knew she was ‘queer’, she could not possibly have guessed, while she was talking to her of an evening in the parlour, the things that were flaring and fleering in her mind like the noises and sights of a fair.

  The doctor had said – looking at her very steadily: ‘But you won’t, you must remember, be really much alone, because you will have your home and your children to think of. You will have them. Think as little as possible about everything else. Just rest, and be looked after.’

  The consequence of which had been the suspicion that she was being not merely ‘looked after’ but watched. And she would openly pretend to set out from the farm in another direction when she was bent on looking once more at her reflection in the pond. None the less she had remembered what the doctor had said, had held on to it almost as if it had been a bag she was carrying and must keep safe. And by and by in the hayfields, in the lanes by the hedges, she had begun to be a quieter companion to herself and even glad of Mrs Simmonds’s company, and of talking to her plump brown-haired daughter, or to the pale skimpy dairy-maid.

  It was curious though that, while passing the opening in the farm-wall she had never failed to cast a glance towards that dark distant mound with its flowers beyond the yard, she had yet never really noticed it. She had seen it, even admired its burden, but not definitely attended to it. It had taken her eye and yet not her attention. She had been far less conscious of it, for example, than of the pretty Jersey heifer that was sometimes there, and even of the tortoiseshell cat, and the cocks and hens, and of the geese in the green meadow.

 
All these she saw with an extraordinary clearness, as if she were looking at them from out of a window in a strange world. They quieted her mind without her being aware of it, and she would talk of them to Mrs Simmonds partly because she was interested to hear about them; partly to keep her in the room; and partly so that she might think of other things while the farmer’s wife was talking. Of other things indeed! – when first and foremost, like a huge louring storm-cloud on the horizon of a sea, there never left her mind for a single moment the memory and influence of her dream. It would sweep back on her, so much distorting her face and clouding her eyes that she would be compelled to turn her head away out of the glare of the parlour lamp, in case Mrs Simmonds should notice it.

  And then came that calm, sunlit afternoon. She had had quiet sleep the night before. It had been her first night at the farm untroubled by sudden galvanic leaps into consciousness and by the swarming cries and phantom faces that appeared as soon as her tired-out eyes hid themselves from the tiny radiance of the nightlight.

  She had been for a walk – yes, and to the reed-pond – and had there promised her absent husband and her two children never to go there again unless she could positively bear herself no longer. She had promised; and, quieted in mind, she was coming back. She remembered even thinking with pleasure of the home-made jam that Mrs Simmonds would give her for her tea.

  There was no doubt at all, then, that she had been getting better – just as before (when the dream came) she had been really, though secretly, getting worse. And as she was turning in home by the farm-gate, she saw Nellie, the heifer, there; the nimble young fawn-haired creature, with its delicate head and lustrous eyes with their long lashes; and she had advanced in her silly London fashion, with a handful of coarse grass, to make real friends with her. The animal had sidled away and then had trotted off into the farmyard, and she had followed it with an unusual effort of will.