The impact shook the walls and rattled the windows of the room beneath. It jarred on the listener’s nerves with the force of an imprecation. As abrupt a silence followed. Nauseated and slightly giddy he got up from his chair, resting his fingers automatically on the guileless pile of books, took up his hat, glanced vacantly at the gilded Piccadilly maker’s name on the silk lining, and turned to go. As he did so, a woeful, shuddering fit of remorse swept over him, like a parched up blast of the sirocco over the sands of a desert. He shot a hasty strangulated look up the narrow empty staircase as he passed by. Then, “Oh God,” he groaned to himself, “I wish—I pray—you poor thing, you could only be a little more at peace—whoever, wherever you are—whatever I am.”
And then he was with the old bookseller again, and the worldly-wise old man was eyeing him as ingenuously as ever over his steel-rimmed glasses.
“He isn’t looking quite himself,” he was thinking. “Bless me, sir,” he said aloud, “sit down and rest a bit. You must have been overdoing it. You look quite het up.”
Alan feebly shook his head. His check was almost as colourless us the paper on which the poems had been printed; small beads of sweat lined his upper lip and damped his hair. He opened his mouth to reassure the old bookseller, but before he could utter a word they were both of them caught up and staring starkly at one another—like conspirators caught in the act. Their eyes met in glassy surmise. A low, sustained, sullen rumble had come sounding out to them from the remoter parts of the shop which Alan had but a moment before left finally behind him. The whole house shuddered as if at the menace of an earthquake.
“Bless my soul, sir!” cried the old bookseller. “What in merciful heaven was that!”
He hurried out, and the next instant stood in the entry of his parlour peering in through a dense fog of dust that now obscured the light of the morning. It silted softly down, revealing the innocent cause of the commotion. No irreparable calamity. It was merely that a patch of the old cracked plaster ceiling had fallen in, and a mass of rubble and plaster was now piled up, inches high, on the gate-leg table and the chair beside it, while the narrow laths of the ceiling above them, a few of which were splintered, lay exposed like the bones of a skeleton. A thick film of dust had settled over everything, intensifying with its grey veil the habitual hush of the charming little room. And almost at one and the same moment the old bookseller began to speculate first, what damages he might have been called upon to pay if his young customer had not in the nick of time vacated that chair, and next, that though perhaps his own little stock of the rare and the curious would be little worse for the disaster, Alan’s venture might be very much so. Indeed, the few that were visible of the little pile of books—but that morning come virgin and speckless from the hands of the binders—were bruised and scattered. And as Mr. Elliott eyed them, his conscience smote him: “Softly now, softly,” he muttered to himself, “or we shall have Mrs. E. down on this in pretty nearly no time!”
But Mrs. E. had not heard. No footfall sounded above; nothing stirred; all remained as it might be expected to remain. And Alan, who meanwhile had stayed motionless in the outer shop, at this moment joined the old bookseller, and looked in on the ruins.
“Well, there, sir,” Mr. Elliott solemnly assured him, “all I can say is, it’s a mercy you had come out of it. And by no more than a hair’s breadth!”
But Alan made no answer. His mind was a void. He was listening again—and so intently that it might be supposed the faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen might reach his ear. It. was too late now—and in any case it hadn’t occurred to him—to add to the title page of his volume that well-worn legend, “The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.” But it might at least have served for his own brief apologia. He had meant well—it would have suggested. You never can tell.
As they stood there, then, a brief silence had fallen on the ravaged room. And then a husky, querulous, censorious voice had broken out behind the pair of them: “Mr. E., where are you?”
Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1956) was an English author, well-known for his book Collected Stories for Children.
Seth is the cartoonist behind the semi-annual hardback series of books, Palookaville.
His comics and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, The Best American Comics, The Walrus, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and countless other publications. His latest graphic novel, Clyde Fans (twenty years in the making), will finally be published in the spring of 2019.
He is the subject of a documentary from the National Film Board of Canada, Seth’s Dominion.
Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Tania, and their two cats in an old house he has named “Inkwell’s End.”
Publisher’s Note: ‘The Green Room’ was first published in 1925 in Two Tales.
Illustrations and design © Seth, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
De la Mare, Walter, 1873-1956, author
The green room / Walter De La Mare;
designed & decorated by Seth.
(Christmas ghost stories)
Short story.
Originally published: London : Bookman’s Journal Office, 1925.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77196-257-5 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77196-258-2 (ebook)
I. Seth, 1962-, illustrator II. Title.
PR6007.E3G74 2018 823’.912 C2018-901749-X
C2018-901750-3
Readied for the press by Daniel Wells
Illustrated and designed by Seth
Proofread by Emily Donaldson
Typeset by Chris Andrechek
The Green Room Page 5