Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  I had come for a week-end. It was six days before I was up again. On the eighth I was ‘down’. Even then, said the doctor, I must not yet attempt to go on my travels. He knew his patrons. His veto was followed by a chorus of delicious ‘Surelies!’ from Flora and John. By the Wednesday of that week I was horribly normal, and being taken for walks and drives. The following Friday, my host and hostess were booked for a visit themselves. Did they speed the parting guest? Not they. They insisted that I should stay on at their house until they came back. Was I quite, quite sure that I should be perfectly happy and comfortable? The servants were, with one exception, black, but comely. Did I really mind being left alone? It was hateful of them to have to go; they would never forgive themselves, but … I hesitated, languished, and gave way.

  Allons, once more. Now, in the first place, I suppose you suppose there isn’t any ‘country’ in the United States? There are excuses for you, because I myself had read a good many American novels without fully realizing what country there is; and till then I had seen chiefly cities. But, gracious heavens, what country! There it was a little like a beautiful kind of Wiltshire or Somerset; but vaster, stretching leagues and leagues away to Columbus knows where, and still all but virgin: virginally free, virginally romantic.

  It was October, you will remember, and I had chanced on one of the loveliest falls since the Mayflower landed its pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. I was by this time as right as a trivet again, though still conscious of the queer sense of novelty and unexpectedness in things which even a slight illness produces, especially ’flu. Every mere man supposes, of course, that a rising temperature is a summons to the grave. Mine had proved only a caveat, and I was at once roving around in the little two-seater that Flora and John had handed over to me for my special recreation.

  They left the house on a Friday afternoon, and on the next my adventure began. I must have trundled on at haphazard about fifteen or twenty miles or so, having turned off from the State road perhaps ten minutes after I left the house, and having clean forgotten that the area of the two Virginias is more than half as large as England. The lane or by-road in which I then found myself had grown steadily more and more like a cart-track, and ever wilder and lovelier. Apart from the incessant multitudinous rasping of the grass-green katydids and crickets – some brilliantly coloured, that fly for a few yards at a stretch – the air was marvellously still over those low hills of fading woods. Above them hung a pale blue afternoon sky, brimmed with sunshine of a gentle and mellow intensity, its shafts eddying silken soft through the dells and dingles around me; shafts, discs, splashes, gilding the very marrow in my bones, surfeiting my eyes and bathing me with delight – a satisfaction, by the way, not discounted by the thought of the weather you were probably enduring at home.

  And the colours! Our English autumn, poor beloved sweetheart, is a comparative child in such matters. Here the trees – oak, dogwood, maple, hickory, sumach – masquerade for weeks together in coats that would have made Jacob weep aloud: amber-yellow, coral-pink, a wondrous rose, blood-red – Bluebeard red. Mounting in cones and domes and triangles above the greyish grass and the sand-colour of the soil, they draped the hills around me, while the track steadily edged off out of civilization, and I went bobbing over its boulders and chasms like a Jack-in-a-box or a monkey-on-a-stick. The only fellow human I had passed – and that was miles behind – was an old negro with a grizzled head who was leading a long-eared mule attached to a low, faded, red-and-green farm-cart.

  I had come to a patch of flattish ground just wide enough to afford me turning room. I got out, intending to push on a few paces beyond a turn in the track in order to get a glimpse of what lay beyond. And, looking down from there into the gully below, I saw – now what do you think? – not a dryad, not a Sioux camp counting its scalps, not a chorus of blackamoors around a keg of rum – but a fragment of abandoned railway line – a phrase, by the way, that amuses our American cousins. There were but twenty yards or so of it in sight, and it was not exactly in spick-and-span order. The gauge was narrow. The steel rails had been torn up. Only the rotting sleepers remained, matted with weeds and bordered with Queen Anne’s lace, golden rod and Michaelmas daisy. A row of telegraph poles (never neat and spruce like ours, but ungainly and crooked) held only one crossbar each, and that adorned with two bright-green twinkling insulators.

  In that country of distances, netted over by scores of thousands of miles of railroads (see Whitaker or The World’s Almanac) on which for ever pound monsters that would set an antediluvian pterodactyl gaping, this narrow derelict strip looked immeasurebly aged, forlorn, and romantic. I was a bit tired, too; and of course that helps. One’s fancy grows a little greedy after illness. Having glanced round for traces of poison-ivy, I sat down on a hump of rock to look at it.

  The line, as I say, led out of a gully and into a gully. And anything, my dear James, which, like Life itself, emanates from no discernible whence, and vanishes out into no detectable whither, is – well, you notice it. My heart leapt up when I beheld that derelict below. And gently, without any warning, as I sat staring downward, there entered upon it, as if moved by clockwork, a man in a cloak and a hat. The eyes under that hat’s brim were bent upon the sleepers as he stepped rapidly on from one to another. He was not tall; the inch of cheek I could see was waxy pale; and his hands were out of sight. He just glided on from sleeper to sleeper: was gone. The clockwork had removed him out of my sight again. It reminded me of a toy I had as a child.

  Why this commonplace spectacle interested me to such a degree I can hardly say. He might have been a phantom. The sun shone on. The katydids continued their courting and their concert; though come but one touch of frost and as if at the flick of a conductor’s baton, that annual harvest festival instantly ceases. Death no more than wags once an icy finger.

  The only other sound was that of shallow running water, and the cry (I think) of mocking-birds. Two things instantly occurred to me: first, I at once badly wanted to follow up the track in the direction from which the human just gone had appeared; and next, I felt a curious apprehension at doing so. There was something in the effect of him oddly exotic and dubious. He stirred urgent remembrances of the ‘movies’ and – now I come to think of it – of no less a man of genius than Mr Charles Chaplin. Have you ever noticed, by the way, how singularly appropriate a name Charles’s Chaplin is for that inexhaustibly melancholic and unworldly Joy of the universe? Whatever he wears, he always appears to be in dead black, and his face looks out like a Child of Mercy from fold upon fold of dingiest crape. What a Hamlet, what an Iago awaits his enterprise! Anyhow, the sight of that cousin of his twenty-times-removed down there, stepping between the flower-bushes under the emerald-studded poles and blood-red branches, had a slight flavour of the preternatural.

  The warmth of the sun was beginning to dwindle and evening was coming on. That afternoon I ventured no further – merely waited until my phantom was well out of hearing before I got into John and Flora’s two-seater again and started up the engine.

  All that evening – windows wide open with their gauze casing to the lofty pillared porch of the house, I sat reading and at the same time thinking of that strip of railroad-track and the odd creature in the gully. I rather fancy I dreamed of him most of that night.

  Happy and copious as ever, the sun rose again next morning, and by two o’clock in the afternoon I was well on my way to my trysting-place. A little reflection had washed out the grotesque apprehension of the day before. None the less, when I got to the end of the wheel marks left by my car on the previous day, I had a good look round before I ventured down into the gully. Once there, on I went. It was impossible at any moment to see more than thirty yards in front of me, because of the winding of these narrow valleys between their hills. The line had evidently been laid for the conveyance not of animate but of inanimate matter.

  I had gone about a mile or so when a little clicking noise in the distance broke the hush. I at once scrambled off the track
into the cover of the trees, and waited. It may have been the dislodging of a stone or the crack of a dry stick I had heard, for in a while two figures appeared: my friend of yesterday and an old stooping negro with a sack on his back. Age has particularly tragic effects on the black: his almost greenish cheeks were sunken in, his lamb’s-wool hair was nearly white, he had a hump on his back, and his long flat feet brought him along with a sort of shuffling trot, for his companion was making no allowances.

  He himself was in the cloak and hat of yesterday; a man, I should guess, of about thirty-eight to forty, sallow, beardless, with a high nose and a stoop. His eyes were unflinchingly fixed on the ground, and I wondered if he would notice any signs of a trespasser. While within hearing this oddly matched pair exchanged not a single word. I watched them out of sight and went on.

  The track at last twisted almost at a right angle, and I found myself surveying what might have been a natural break in the hillside, and what were clearly the relics of an abandoned quarry. And a little this side of its further horn I saw a house. Like all solitary houses, it stood up there in the silence under the blue-bowled sky mute with its own story. Its front side was at an angle with me: it was sideways on, I mean. The few windows I could see were shuttered; its timbers dangled with leafy wisps of brilliantly-dyed creeper – vines as they are called more picturesquely over there.

  It was a house of three stories, rather lanky in look; its blue paint was faded, though it showed no traces of decay. None the less, it had a deserted, almost forlorn appearance. Indeed with that semi-precipitous background, and beneath its fringes of gaudy woodland, it was exactly the species of house one would expect to find as the terminus of a dismantled railroad – a railroad obviously intended for the conveyance of the stone, or whatever it might be was quarriable, among these hills.

  There was a something else in the aspect of the house a good deal more difficult to describe, though this effect may in part have been retrospective. It looked (I can’t quite explain it) as if it were the headquarters of Somebody or Something. It looked like an old woman with vanishing tinged-up traces of the beauty she once enjoyed – as if it had had a past. Indeed I should guess it was well over a hundred years old. Apart from that – as if the lady still insisted on dressing to her past – the flat ground in front of it was densely carpeted with convolvuluses (‘Morning Glory’): a living mat of a myriad tiny silent trumpets; bright blue, red, purple, slashed, striped, parti-coloured. A ravishing sight to see!

  I stayed there, drawn back a little out of view of the windows, watching the house for some little time. A few large, black heavy birds, of the crow kind apparently, were circling sluggishly over the trees above. There was no particular reason to hesitate to go on, and ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ is a sign that one sees far less rarely in America than ‘Live Wire: Keep Off!’ But if the four last words had been scrawled up in paint on the nearest tree they would not have seemed inappropriate. Indeed if I had supposed the gentleman in the cloak was within, I should have turned back. He looked inhospitable. But he was safely ‘out’ it seemed, and for at least half an hour or so. So at length I went on.

  Taking into consideration what I am going to tell you in a minute or two, it is proof of the solitude and isolation of the house that when I came round to the further side of it, past the main porch, there was an open door; and just within, on a table, were a few pieces of old silver and of Oriental porcelain that would have made a Duveen’s mouth water. They looked singularly incongruous, somehow. And still there was no symptom or rumour of life whatever, though nearby stood a shed containing an immense heap of pumpkins, beside which lay an old bridle and a bill-hook.

  There could be no harm in enquiring my way and asking for a drink of water. I rapped on the open door, and waited. Beyond it was a narrow staircase; but not a picture on the walls, not a shred of carpet on the boards. After waiting a few minutes I edged in a little, and peeped into a room. That, too, was empty, except for a rusty stove and a bowlful of brilliant fairy-like miniature gourds on the chimneypiece, as gay as a child’s paintbox. Curtains, quite clean, and yet as if they had come from Nottingham twenty years ago and had been undisturbed ever since, hung at this window. This was evidently an entrance seldom used.

  Not a sound came from within, and at last – it was my first attempt at housebreaking, and I still blush for it – at last I could resist the temptation no longer. After one hasty glance outside to make sure that master and man were not returning, I crept rapidly up the stairs. To this moment I can’t conceive what induced me to make such a venture. The call of the wild, I suppose!

  The first flight gave only on to shut doors, and for the moment I dared not risk opening any; but continued the ascent instead. And at the top of the next flight I came to a room that was evidently a man’s room. It contained some old bits of rather uncouth but pleasant Colonial furniture, and a good many books. If the house had any central heating apparatus it was evidently not yet in use; the room was coldish. Shutters were over one of the windows, and it smelt stuffy and of old cigar smoke.

  It was neverthless a pleasant and well-proportioned room with a curious air of serenity in spite of the gentleman who some sixty or seventy years ago had painted the portraits on the walls and had achieved only daubs and caricatures. There were four or five of them at least, and they looked across at me with a fixed unsmiling astonishment, and a mute ‘And who are you?’

  Some primitive embroidery and Indian beadwork lay here and there, and over the fireplace another strip of it. At the further end of the room was a door ajar. This evidently led off to the rest of the house, but at this – at my – end of the room, and not three paces away, was yet another door opening inwards and partially concealed by a sort of old dresser with a few books and knick-knacks on its shelves. This had been drawn aside and not replaced. My heart gave a thump or two at sight of it, for as likely as not someone might be sitting within – and what reception would he be likely to give an interloper like myself? Still innocence is innocence all the world over, and can be brazen at that. Again I listened, then stepped across the faded carpet, tapped, paused, and looked in.

  I found myself on the threshold of a room in area about six yards or so by four, and low-ceiled. Its walls were roughly whitewashed and there was but one half-obscured window, over which gauze mosquito frames were fixed. It was cold, still, and empty: except that in each of the four corners of the ceiling a small gilded seraph in rough carved wood hung suspended with outstretched wings. The bowed heads of these seraphim were directed inwards towards a gilded image of the sun in the midst of the ceiling, its rays radiating outwards, like the design on a mariner’s compass. There was but one piece of furniture in the room – a table, and in the centre of it was what appeared to be a plain ebony box inlaid with silver and ivory.

  I stood in that twilight with eyes fixed on this small box – the distant whirring of the grasshoppers in the flowers and sand below the only sound to be heard. The secret, the kernel, the meaning of these peculiar surroundings must lie concealed in this box, I thought. It fascinated me.

  Influenza (have you ever noticed it?) is apt to leave behind it a phlegmatic audacity. One does not seem to mind much what happens next; because, I suppose, one’s nerves are fatigued and yet excited after its dose of poison. But this situation in any circumstances was out of the common – that abandoned track, the exotic details, the huge fall of rock, the faded ungainly house amid its marvellous carpeting of convolvulus. And last, this shrine.

  Remember, too, that I was a stranger and that this was Virginia; the old old Virginia of Raleigh and the plantations, of Old Joe and the minstrels; of the aristocratic, defeated, gallant, romantic Southerners! A nobler spirit than mine would, of course, have at once withdrawn in shame and regret at such a trespass, such sheer effrontery. Instead, still intent on the slightest whisper of sound in the house beneath me, I stepped over, laid my fingers on the ebony case and lifted it.

  It was as though at a g
esture I had pushed aside a tiny shutter between this world and Paradise. Instantly the room in which I stood was suffused to its uttermost angles with a gentle unsurpassable radiance – a radiance of a faint lovely lilac-blue, resembling in colour the flickering summer lightning one occasionally sees in our English thunderstorms. How much of this effulgence was its own and how much a condensation of the twilight from the muffled window I cannot tell; but it proceeded, at any rate, from a diamond that now lay revealed in the middle of the table on its low carved ebony stand. It was a diamond in size and shape rather like a flat-ended apple – flat at the base, I mean; and in its cutting a blunted cone.

  Well: I never hope to make you realize the curious solemnity of this experience. Without much ‘fire’ or coruscation this marvellous gem icily burned there – burned there with its own imprisoned radiance and with borrowed reflections of the waning day. It shone so softly it might have been asleep. And as I watched it there in the midst of the wooden table, not a thought entered my mind except that of its surpassing beauty in this plain whitewashed setting, mused over by its guardian seraphim and plumb beneath that raying outspread sun. Maybe, apart from the fact of its mere actuality, there was nothing very remarkable in this; even a green field in sunshine wears an almost incredible radiance, and human faces now and then seem to be illuminated as if from within. Even the plainest and commonest object is capable of a seemingly miraculous metamorphosis, given the moment of insight.

  However that may be, without realizing it, I must for a few moments have slipped into a kind of trance or daydream in mere contemplation of the thing. Sum-m-ject and om-m-ject, as Coleridge used to say: here we were: en rapport. Neither then nor since, I may as well tell you, have I for an instant coveted to possess that object. There is a limit even to the instinct of acquisitiveness. You might as well plot to embezzle the evening star.