‘Why don’t you look out of the window, Emmie?’ said he.
‘I’m a-making the bed, Peter, don’t you see?’ said Emma.
‘You can see Mrs Watts feeding the chickens,’ said Peter.
Emma drew aside the window blind and looked out. Peter stood still, watching her intently.
‘She’s gone in now, and they are all pecking in the dust,’ said Emma.
‘Can you see the black-and-white pussycat on our fence, Emmie?’ said Peter in a soft voice.
Emma looked down towards the poplar trees at the foot of the garden.
‘No,’ she said, ‘and the sparrows are pecking up the crumbs I shook out of the tablecloth, so she can’t be in our garden at all.’
Emma turned away from the window, and set to dusting the looking-glass, unheeding her grave reflection. Peter watched her in silence awhile.
‘But, Emmie, didn’t you see anything else in the bottom of the garden?’ he said. But he said it in so small a voice that Emma, busy at her work, did not hear him.
In the evening of that day Peter and his aunt went out to water the mignonette and the sweet-williams, and the nasturtiums in the garden. There were slipper sweetpeas there, also, and lad’s love, and tall hollyhocks twice as high as himself swaying, indeed, their topmost flower-cups above his aunt’s brown head. And Peter carried down the pots of water to his aunt, and watered the garden, too, with his small rose-pot. Yet he could not forbear glancing anxiously and timidly towards the poplars, and following up with his eye the gigantic shape of his fancy that he found there.
‘Aren’t the trees sprouting up tall, Auntie?’ said he, standing close beside her.
‘That they are, Peter,’ said his aunt. ‘Now some for the middle bed, my man, though I’m much afeared the rose-bush is done for with blight: time it blossomed long since.’
‘How high are the trees, Auntie?’ said Peter.
‘Why, surely they’re a good lump higher than the house; they do grow wonderful fast,’ said his aunt, stooping to pluck up a weed from the bed.
‘How high is the house, Auntie?’ said Peter, bending down beside her.
‘Bless me! I can’t tell you that,’ said she, glancing up; ‘ask Mr Ash there in his garden. Good-evening, Mr Ash; here’s my little boy asking me how high the house is – they do ask questions, to be sure.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Ash, narrowing his eye, over the fence, ‘I should think, ma’am, it were about thirty foot high; say thirty-five foot to the rim of the chimney-pot.’
‘Is that as high as the trees?’ said Peter.
‘Now, which trees might you be meaning, my friend?’ said Mr Ash.
‘You mean those down by the fence yonder, don’t you, Peter?’ said his aunt. ‘Poplars, aren’t they? That’s what he means, Mr Ash.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Ash, pointing the stem of his pipe towards them, ‘if you ask me, the poplars must be a full forty foot high, and mighty well they’ve growed, too, seeing as how I saw ’em planted.’
Peter watched Mr Ash attentively, as he stood there looking over the fence towards the poplar-trees. But his aunt began to talk of other matters, so that Mr Ash said no more on the subject. Yet he did not appear to have descried anything out of the common there.
Now the evening was darkening; already a lamp was shining at an upper window, and the crescent moon had become bright in the west. Peter stayed close beside his aunt; sometimes peeping from behind her skirts towards the trees, glancing from root to foliage, to crown, and thence into the shadowy skies, whence the daylight was fast withdrawing. By and by his aunt began to feel the chill of the night air. She bade Mr Ash good-night, and went into the house with Peter. Soon Peter heard Mr Ash scraping his boots upon the stones. Presently he also went in, and shut his door, leaving the gardens silent now.
At this time Peter was making a rabbit-hutch out of a sugar-box; but tonight he had no relish for the work, and sat down with a book, while Emma learned her spelling, repeating the words to herself.
‘Auntie,’ said Peter, looking up when the clock had ceased striking, ‘If Satan was to come in our garden, would he be like a man, or is he little like a hunchback?’
‘Dearie me? what’ll these stories put into his head next? Why, Peter, God would not let him come up into the world like that, not to hurt His dear children. But if they are bad, wicked children, and grown-up folks too for that matter, then God goes away angry, and the Spirit is grieved too. Why, my pretty, in pictures he has great dark wings, just as the angels’ are beautiful and bright; but the good angels watch and guard little children and all good people.’
‘Then he’s just as big as a man in the pictures, like Mr Ash, not a —’
‘Aunt Elizabeth has heaps of pictures of him in a book, Auntie, with all the wicked angels crowding round,’ said Emma; ‘but he’s much taller than Mr Ash, like a giant, and they are all standing up in the sky, and —’
‘Yes, Emmie, that’s in the book, I daresay,’ said her aunt, frowning at Emma, and nodding her head. ‘But come and sit on Auntie’s lap, dearie; why he looks quite scared, poor pigeon, with his stories. Auntie will tell you about little Snow White, shall she? – about little Snow White and the dwarfs?’
Peter said nothing, though his lip trembled; and albeit he asked no more questions, yet he did not attend to the story of Snow White.
At the beginning of the next day, Peter woke soon after the dawning, and getting out of bed peered through the glass of his window, down the garden. The flowers were not yet unfolded in the misty air. There was no movement nor sound anywhere. The trees leaned motionless in the early morning. But towering implacable against the rosy east stood that gigantic spectre of his imagination, secret and terrific there. And Peter with a sob ran back quickly to bed.
However, he mentioned nothing of his thoughts during the day, eating his breakfast, and going to school as usual. But when he reached school he had forgotten his lessons, and was kept in. Even there, alone in the vacant schoolroom, he could not learn his returned lessons because of all his vivid fears passing to and fro in his mind. As the afternoon decreased, hour by hour, towards evening, he began to hate the memory of night and bedtime. He lingered on, seeking any excuse for light and company, until Emma spoke roughly to him. ‘Leave off worrying, Peter, do! How you do worry!’
At last, when even his aunt grew vexed at his disobedience, Peter begged her for a light to go to bed by. At first she refused, laughing at his timidity. But, in the end, with importunities he persuaded her; and she gave him a piece of candle in his room, to be burned in a little water, in order that when he was asleep, and the burning wick should fall low, then the water would rush in and extinguish it.
It was far in the night, just when the flame of the candle leapt out into darkness with a hiss, that Peter woke from a dream, and sat up trembling in his bed. He had dreamed of a street in the distance, whither a giant became a speck, and the eye was strained in vain. Even yet he saw its undimmed length retreating back unimaginably. And, as if impelled by an influence inscrutable, he got out silently and drew back the muslin window-blind. In the clear, dark air he saw the row of poplar trees; he saw that gigantic shade of fear abiding there, uplifted as with a threat, and the trembling stars of the heavens about him for a head-dress.
Peter cried out in terror at the sight, hiding his eyes in his hands. And while he stood sobbing bitterly, scarcely able to take breath, his ear caught a sound in the room like the wintry shaking of dry reeds at the brink of a pool. At this new sound he caught back his sobs; his scalp seemed to creep upon his head. He looked out between his fingers towards the bed; and he saw there an Angel standing, whose face was white and steadfast as silver, and whose eyes were pure as the white flame of the Holy Ones. His wings were to him as a covering of perfect brightness, his feet hovering in the silentness of the little room. Peter, his tears dried upon his face, could not bear to gaze long upon that steadfast figure angelical; yet it seemed as if he was now indeed come out of a
dreadful vision into the pure and safe light of day; and when presently the visitant was vanished away, he went back into his still warm bed, his fear more than half abated, and fell asleep.
In the morning, when he looked out of the window, a gentle rustling rain was falling, clear in the reflected cloud-light of the sun. He could hear the waterdrops running together and dripping down from leaf to leaf. He heard the sparrows chirping upon the housetop, the remote crowing of a cock. And the poplar-trees were swaying their leafy tops in the cool air, as if they also had awakened refreshed from the evil perils of a dream.
1 First published in Pall Mall Magazine, May-August 1901, ‘by Walter Ramal’; later published in Eight Tales, ed. Edward Wagenknecht, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1971.
De Mortuis1
There is a graveyard by a solitary wayside, with many an antique tomb in the seclusion of umbrageous yews and willows. A rude wall of flint, the glittering target of the sunbeams, is its barrier against the wild, unconsecrated moorland; a dark tower its ancient sentinel. It is an abandoned garden where flowers meet together without favour – rosemary and nettle, myrtle and lily, and yellow charlock. Green unweeded paths are the waste avenue of its dead. It is the resort of wild bees and yet wilder birds, whose murmur and melody cease only with the twilight, the hour of the owl and the nightjar. There is no sound of lamentation in all its silent ways. A quiet company, country people all, is laid here, who have in stealth departed, and do not return. ‘O Death, O Time,’ cries one, ‘the wicket and the approach!’ The wicket in due season has been unlatched to each; and now none comes: theirs is the wild vacant solitude, theirs the thicket of elder and crimson hawthorn. Moss, and lichen, and stringent ivy weave ever upon their names and legends the immortal web of oblivion.
They found death no unwholesome theme for rhyme, these country people; they knew him of old – a strange whimsical figure enough with his great key, silent yet eloquent, austere, capricious. To die was but to make an end, the ruddy sun on the stubble, the dark wintry staircase to bed; and the tombstone being narrow at best, and transient after all, they did not daub it with flattery, but they put much in little space:
Here lieth alone John Alfred Mole:
He hath burrowed now so deep, poor soul.
the final jest of all, and not quite heartless. You may see ‘Mary Alice Gilmore’ very clearly in her muslin gown:
She came with her garland all in the May morning,
Her face shining fair as the milk in the pail,
But Death walked behind her with yew and with cypress,
And hath lured her away to his house in the vale.
A rain-darked stone, a pace or two beyond, echoes shrilly that desperate cry in the Urn Burial – ‘Even such as hope to rise again …’:
Dig not my grave o’er-deep,
Lest in my sleep
I strive with sudden fear
Towards the sweet air.
Alas! lest my dim eye
Should open clear
To the depth and the weight –
Pity my fear!
Friends, I have such a wild fear
Of depth, and space,
And heaviness, O bury me
In easy place!
He has a friable soil for his rest – too easy, perhaps, if his fear quicken also against the ‘wolf with nails’. Nearby, a vacant man is interred, whose dull ear would scarce have caught the clangour of his own elegiac bells:
HERE LIES THOMAS MATTHEW DALE,
aet: 81
He lay like to a simple child,
So stealthily old Death drew near;
His intellects were all too dim
T’acquaint his soul with fear.
White as the blackthorn bloom his head,
His voice like a far singing bird,
His hands they trembled like a leaf
By southern breezes stirred.
He seemed a stranger to his frame,
He seemed his spirit was elsewhere gone,
Nor found not any selfsame thought
Of what he gazed upon.
Like jargoning bells blown out of tune,
Yet with a sweetness on the wind,
God leads us young and old about
Just as He hath a mind.
The alien grave of the sailor is in the morning shadow of the low wall, dense with flowering nettles, sated with dew:
Here sleepeth a poor mariner,
And only silence him to cheer:
He pineth for the roaring sea,
Who must in earth so quiet be:
There seemed a voice in the deep sea,
That strange and winsome haunted he.
But the deep sea is beyond the hills, and the wind faint only with the inland sweetness. It might be the quavering voice of Darby McGraw himself complaining of exile.
Thomas Small, a miller, fusty yet of meal, who died in dark February, keeps him company:
Here lies a Miller;
Each working day
He went as white
As blossoming May:
A goodly thing enough to be
If thy soul do keep thee company;
and a philosophic warrior, his field of valour undecipherable:
This quiet mound beneath
Lies Corporal Pym,
He had no fear of death,
Nor death of him.
Close to the footpaths, so that children must often have fingered the two long ears rudely carved at the upper corners of its leaning stone, is the grave of a mute. Beneath his pollard window of an April evening, Pan pipes luringly – and in vain – as if the blackbirds were singing.
Step soft, good friends, for though a mute,
Silence doth best the sleeper suit.
A mute cares little for the sound of his name: there is scored deep only ‘A.A.’
Under a mound that now scarce would harbour a cherub, a comrade of Falstaff gluts his great body with an intolerable deal of slumber:
Here lies the body of Andrew Haste,
Now in the ground doth go of waste,
If Mr Haste you e’er did see,
Ye’ll know what a terrible waste it be.
Laid a little out of line, three strangers, who could go no farther, solace themselves; the first a rhymeless traveller in a cloak.
Here lies a stranger to this place;
’Twas a windy eve he came upon,
At dusk he opens the tavern door
And with a few words climbs up to his bed;
The red cock up in the morning crew,
But neither he nor the chambermaid
Might rouse the stranger where he lay,
Wrapped in his cloak there still and grey.
The second, a needy fellow with two very memorable ‘e’e,’ serves for the celebration of his benefactors a meek and not unusual office of poverty:
Mistress Mellor hemmed a shroud
For this stranger beggar man;
Peter, Sexton, digs his grave
Comforting as ever he can;
Just rags and bones and greenish e’e
Were all this begger was pardee!
In the dazzling fervour of the summer sun stands an obelisk, evidently a public purchase. Yet, despite its unseemly pallor, it is not out of place, for the unstable earth has fallen away, proving it a very trivial thing. Its legend is certainly not the work of its mason:
Here rests in peace, and security,
Ann Fell, who was
Cruelly, and foully done to death
In Milton Fields,
Snow lying deep upon the ground.
Sleep without fear, sweet Ann,
Thy murderer cometh not
To wreak his vengeance
In this quiet spot.
Hid in the silver clouds
The sworded legions move:
What shall his hate
’Gainst legions prove?
Like glouts of summer dew
Thy blood shall be,
Rubies celestial
&nb
sp; For the blest Mary.
The wind ever hums along the jagged flints where lies a leper uncontagious:
Toll ye the Bell, a Leper now is come
To the gate merciful of his long Home;
Like a Paule’s scales his filthy Sores shall be
When heaven’s glory he doth blinking see;
Whiter than Snow his body’s Skin shall shine,
As Moses’ face in Israelitish eyne;
But, when old Dives knocketh, black with Sin,
D’ye think Saint Leper will invite him in?
Time has shown. At the foot of the quiet, windy tower in the deeper grasses is the dust of ‘Elizabeth Page, Spinster’:
Here sleeps a maiden who deceased
On the even before her marriage feast;
All put with sprigs of lavender
Lieth the gown she’ll never wear;
Idle and quite untenanted
Her gloves, her shoes; her nosegay dead;
Yea, even her smock her shroud now is,
And rosemary for love’s caress.
Ah! Wo is me poor piteous bride,
Would we were lying side by side!
One vault there is, stared upon by the attentive gargoyles of the tower. It is large and lichenous, and echoes the note of the bird in its depths.
Fall down upon thy bended knees, O man,
And ’twixt thy restless finger and thy thumb
Roll but a fragment of this crumbling earth,
And know that ev’n to this thou shalt come!
Put thou thy naked hand upon this stone,
Compose thy heart, and in thy fancy see
A form without friend, or comeliness, or power;
Even to this thou too shalt come with me.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 65
