This collection first published 2017 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Copyright © 2017 The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare
Introduction copyright © 2017 Greg Buzwell
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 5675 6
eISBN 978 0 7123 6448 5
The texts of these stories are taken from the critical edition of Walter de la Mare’s short stories published by Giles de la Mare Publishers
eBook, text design and typesetting by Tetragon, London
Contents
Introduction
Kismet
A:B:O.
The Riddle
Out of the Deep
Seaton’s Aunt
Winter
The Green Room
All Hallows
A Recluse
Crewe
A Revenant
The Guardian
INTRODUCTION
What qualities contribute to the making of a really good ghost story? A deftly crafted air of unease and suspense is essential. A well-defined sense of place is also an advantage – the isolated mist-shrouded mansion, or the forest landscape never penetrated by the sun. Then you need a protagonist, someone who is haunted as much by loneliness and doubt as by the spirits of those departed. All these qualities help to shape a good ghost story, but the best ghost stories, and those by Walter de la Mare are certainly among the best, have something else in their favour – an enduring sense of mystery and a solution or explanation that remains tantalisingly out of reach. Take for example the most famous ghost story of them all, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). James’s tale certainly has the atmosphere, the location and the troubled protagonist, but it also raises numerous tantalising questions. Are the ghosts in the story ‘real’, or do they only exist within the mind of the governess? Do the children within her care see the ghosts but refuse to admit it, or are they totally innocent and merely bewildered by events? Is the governess malevolent or mad, or is she rather the only hope of salvation in a story that deals almost exclusively with evil? James’s ability to weave ambiguity into the fabric of the tale makes it a sublime ghost story. As the stories in this collection reveal, Walter de la Mare possessed a very similar ability to create narratives in which many interpretations are possible, something which – taken together with his perfectly pitched sense of place and his elegant prose – made him one of the finest writers of supernatural tales in the language.
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was born in Charlton, Kent, the sixth of the seven children of James Edward Delamare (as the name was originally spelled), an official at the Bank of England, and his wife Lucy Sophia. He was educated at St Paul’s Cathedral School, from which perhaps his love of ecclesiastical buildings derives. Like the work of his near-contemporary M. R. James, the ghost stories of Walter de la Mare often feature cathedrals, churches and churchyards. The layers of history, antiquity, legend and ritual associated with such places makes them ideal settings for tales in which the seemingly safe and traditional often harbours something altogether more mysterious. Later, between 1890 and 1908 he worked in the statistics department of the Anglo-American Oil Company, a dreary and ill-paid job that he made bearable by writing stories and poems in his spare time. In August 1899 he married Constance Elfrida Ingpen and the couple had four children, the eldest of whom, Richard, became chairman of the publishing house Faber and Faber.
De la Mare’s career as a writer began to take flight in the mid-1890s, just as a taste for Gothic and supernatural tales was beginning to flourish. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, had been published in 1891, while Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw would appear in 1897 and 1898 respectively. M. R. James’s first collection of ghost stories – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary – was published in 1904, although some of the stories including ‘Lost Hearts’ and ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ had first appeared in the mid-1890s. For someone with an interest in writing mysterious and haunting tales there were few better times to embark upon a literary career than the Victorian fin de siècle. De la Mare’s first published story, ‘Kismet’, appeared in the Sketch in 1895 under the pseudonym Walter Ramal. The story, which opens with two lone travellers, one on foot and the other with a horse and cart (a cart in which there is a coffin) owes something to Thomas Hardy. Like Hardy’s work, the stories of de la Mare reveal a great love of the English countryside, with its buildings and its people, its folklore and its customs. Like Hardy, again, de la Mare’s stories often feature a strong undercurrent of melancholy. The protagonists, particularly in the later stories, are often men who find themselves suddenly faced with old age, gloomily left to reflect upon distant youthful days and the path not travelled. Perfect, in many ways, for ghost stories – a genre in which the past is frequently more alive than the present.
Walter de la Mare’s literary output was huge. He published over a thousand poems and rhymes, about a hundred short stories and four novels, including the sinister The Return (1910), a tale of possession from beyond the grave, and the splendidly titled and surreal Memoirs of a Midget (1921). Although accomplished in every literary form to which he turned his hand, he is especially well known today for his ghost stories. The reasons for his success in the field are many, but one comment that sheds particular light on his success occurs in a letter he wrote to Naomi Royde-Smith, the literary editor of the Saturday Westminster Gazette, in August 1911: ‘Now and again over one’s mind comes the glamour of a kind of visionary world saturating this’. This observation gives us an insight into the faintly hallucinatory quality possessed by many of de la Mare’s ghost stories, that sense of meaning being ever so slightly beyond our grasp and the feeling that events are running marginally out of kilter with reality. A particularly good example of this occurs in his story ‘Winter’, in which a figure glimpsed in a snowy churchyard appears not so much as an illusion or a ghost but rather as a visitor from an alternate world existing just beyond that which our senses normally perceive.
Walter de la Mare’s prolific output makes the task of selecting just a few of his finest ghost stories a difficult one. Some tales, such as ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, ‘Out of the Deep’ and ‘All Hallows’, have been much anthologised over the years, but their quality means they deserve another outing. ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ in particular is a work shrouded in such mystery, and open to so many interpretations, that few supernatural tales can rival its air of enigmatic menace. Other tales in this volume are much less well known. ‘A:B:O.’, for example, owes something to M. R. James, featuring as it does a box containing a creature that bears some (but disturbingly not quite enough) resemblance to a human being. ‘The Riddle’, meanwhile, is a short tale that perfectly captures de la Mare’s ability to turn expectations upside down – initially the story appears to centre upon a group of children, but it is the old lady with whom they are staying who carries the weight and the meaning of the story. ‘The Green Room’, meanwhile, is a brilliant example of descriptive writing with its perfectly evoked setting of a book-lined room in which the shadows play upon the walls as the seasons change outside. As a descriptive writer, and a writer with a poet’s eye for the perfect word, de la Mare has few equals.
Finally, to return to where we started, perhaps it is worth adding one more quality to the ingredients of an excellent ghost story. Along with atmosphere, suspense, place and mystery we should add – as with all the best fiction – the ability to bear repeate
d rereading. Indeed one could argue that de la Mare’s ghost stories demand rereading. They do not rely on a single twist ending for their dramatic impact – something which, no matter how brilliantly executed, tends to work only on a first reading. De la Mare is much more subtle than that, and with each rereading of his stories new details emerge, deft descriptions take on a new significance, and the seemingly throwaway comments made by a character gain a new depth. And yet each newly revealed detail only serves to deepen the surrounding mystery and makes the story itself more sinister, and more profound.
KISMET
The man in the cart, when he reached the top of the long hill up which the old mare had been steadily plodding, was rejoiced to spy against the whiteness of the road beyond the figure of a man walking. For, although he was of a taciturn disposition, and cared little for company, yet on this night he felt lonely. At times, even, he had peered timorously between the trees that overshadowed the roadway, and had started in affright when the ring of the hoofs on the frozen ground had roused some bird from sleep, and the sound of its swift flight could be heard, growing gradually fainter, till hushed in the distance. Uncanny stories had flocked up from forgotten stores of memory, and, with the creeping of his flesh, haunting fancies had come that grim shapes were gathering behind him. With a shudder at the dread thought, he had pulled the collar of his heavy coat about his ears, and so had sat, almost fearful to breathe.
But now, as he leisurely drove down the steady decline, the sight of the lonely figure in the distance restored his usual stupidity; defiantly he hummed under his breath a song brimming over with blasphemy against all midnight loiterers other than those of the flesh, to which song the mare put back her ears, and hearkened in astonishment.
As he drew slowly nearer to the traveller, suddenly a great, deep voice came leaping through the cold air, roaring out the swinging chorus of some song of the sea; the man in the cart stopped dead in his crooning, and listened in amazement to the intense happiness that rang in every note. The music in the song seemed to run in his blood – a shudder shook him from head to foot. The song ceased as suddenly as it had begun; the traveller had heard the noise of the approaching cart, and was now waiting at the side of the road till it should come up with him.
The driver pulled up near at hand, and eyed the stranger with some curiosity; the mare also turned her head to gaze wonderingly at him for a moment, then shook herself, till every scrap of metal on her harness rang again. The stranger startled the man in the cart when he spoke, so intent was his stare.
‘How far might it be to Barrowmere?’ inquired the man on foot.
‘Nigh on seven mile,’ replied the driver, with wonder in his brain at a man possessing the courage to walk alone at midnight through the still country lanes.
‘Thanks,’ said the stranger shortly, in a bluff, hearty voice, then turned as if to continue his tramp.
The driver watched him a few paces. ‘He’s a seaman,’ he muttered to himself, ‘and I don’t make no doubt but he’s going home,’ after which reflection he was about to gather up the reins to continue his interrupted journey, when his whole face lit up at the brilliant charitable idea that, as he was taking much the same way as the other, he should offer him a lift in the cart. His plump cheeks grew hot with virtuous pride as he shouted, ‘Hi! Was it Barrowmere you said?’
The man wheeled round smartly. ‘Barrowmere it was!’ he sang out in answer.
‘I be going to Barrowmere,’ said the driver. ‘There’s room enough behind if you want a lift.’
The stranger with the joyous resonant voice strode back, and swung himself into the cart with a muscular jerk.
‘P’raps you’ll sit there,’ said the driver, pointing with the butt of his whip to a tarpaulin-covered box at the bottom of the cart.
There the stranger sat himself down. ‘Thankee,’ he said.
A peculiar smile sped over the driver’s face as he shook the reins and drove on without another word.
By degrees he grew morose and sulky. He blamed the traveller for accepting his hospitable offer.
The stranger, who was muffled to the chin in a thick pea-jacket, made a vain attempt to converse with the driver, but finding him both unwilling and witless, he turned his attention to his more pleasant thoughts. His suntanned face beamed at the thought of the meeting with his wife soon to come about, he chuckled audibly as he imagined her surprised delight, and he rubbed his hands for the twentieth time when the full subtlety of his little joke in not letting her know the day of his return was again forced upon him.
The full moon flooded the fields with light, making them appear even colder than in reality they were; a very slight fall of snow and a sharp frost had clothed the trees and hedges in a shimmering glory of sparkling white. Not a sound was in the air save the buzz of the cart’s wheels, the steady beat of the hoofs, and an occasional shuddering snort from the mare. The cold was severe, at times compelling both men to beat their arms upon their bodies to restore the running of their blood.
Maybe it was the intense silence, maybe the lonely hour of the night, that oppressed the spirits; but there slowly crept over the traveller, who until now had been in so genial a humour, a stern sobriety, a vague presage of impending disaster, an unreasonable mistrust of his former jollity, so that he sat dumb and perplexed on his seat in the cart, watching the sharp-drawn shadows of the trees upon the white road flit silently by, eyeing with stealthy suspicion the burly, bowed body of the driver, and the while ardently desiring the eager arms of his wife.
The traveller got upon his feet in the cart and peered over the driver’s shoulder. He could see, in the hollow ahead, the first outlying cottage of the village, and the blood surged up in his body as one by one the well-remembered landmarks of home came into view.
His heart yearned for the shelter of his house, for the kiss of the loved woman: he reminded himself of the mate of his little craft, who knew no friend in the world to give him welcome.
The driver looked back over his shoulder at the stranger, and muttered huskily, ‘That be Barrowmere yonder.’
The stranger paid him no heed; at the same moment the notion had come into his head that he would get down from the cart and travel the remainder of the journey on foot; he had no mind that his surly companion should witness his meeting with his wife. So he tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned sulkily; he was bidden pull up, and obeyed with sullen tardiness. The seaman leaped out at the back, tossed a coin to the man, who pocketed it with a nod of thanks and drove on again; the peculiar smile reappeared as he muttered to something between the ears of the old mare.
‘I do hope, now, he finds it easy.’
And the man of the sea was trudging slowly along the country lane towards his home; he was rejoiced to be free from his unfriendly companion; his good spirits began to return to him; when, on a sudden, the piteous, wailing howl of a dog struck upon his ears – terror seized upon him for a moment, so that he gasped for breath and trembled as he walked. Bitterly he cursed the land; he vowed he would carry his wife away to the sea and never touch England again.
With almost unwilling footsteps, he approached the bend in the road where his cottage would come into view; every tiny twig in the hedgerows was its own self in glass, not a cloud obscured the living heavens, only the pitiless, cold stare of the moon upon all and the silence of death. It ate into the heart of the man as he walked; he feared greatly, though he knew not why nor what manner of thing he feared. With bated breath, he turned the corner; there lay his home, peaceful under the white moonlight; but his surprise was great at seeing the cart he had journeyed in at a standstill before the little rustic gate. The man, apparently, had entered the house, for the horse was standing with hanging head, its reins tied to the gate-post, awaiting its driver. He walked quietly towards the house, with that strange misgiving at his heart. When he reached it, he feared to enter. He looked into the cart; the box he had used as a seat had gone. He made a weak attempt to laugh his fears dow
n, but failed miserably.
The windows facing the roadway were in pitch darkness; no sign was there that life was within. The seaman crept with muffled footsteps to the back of the house, and there rose into the night again the desolate howling of a dog. He leant over the rough wooden rail and called softly. The dog – his dog – whined joyously, straining at its chain to welcome its master.
He leapt over the low fence; the idea crossed his mind that he was using his own house like a thief in the night. He paused for a moment, perplexed at the sudden beam of light which had dazzled his eyes. He glanced up to discover whence it came; the curtains had been drawn across one of the windows, but had not met, thus leaving a narrow space through which the bright rays of light were streaming out upon the night from within – it was the window of his bedroom.
With fitful breath he crept over to the dog, and fondled it for a while, but still keeping his eyes fixed upon that lonely beam of light. The dog licked its master’s hand in unrestrained joy at his return.
And there came into the man’s mind a fervent desire to look in through that window. He struggled with himself to restrain the impulse, and to knock boldly at the door, but his wild forebodings and fears of unknown evil conquered him. He looked round for some means by which he might reach the window.
A large tree grew a few yards from the house, a bough of which jetted out towards the window; he remembered that, when he had lain awake on summer nights gone by, he had heard it tapping against the pane. With reluctant steps, he crawled to the tree, clasped a projecting knot, and began to climb the weather-worn trunk. With much labour he scrambled on till at last he reached the bough that ran out towards the house. His hands were numb with the frost and cold. Slowly he crept on, trembling and panting. One last painful effort, and he lay on the branch, with his face toward the window, the light beaming out into his blue eyes.
Gradually he grew accustomed to the glare; he saw plainly into the room.
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