Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales

by Walter De la Mare

  In the spell of this reverie, time seemed to have become of an almost material density. The past hung like cobwebs in the air. He turned his head abruptly; he was beginning to feel a little uneasy. And his eyes now fixed themselves on the narrow panelled door above the three stairs on the other side of the room. When consciousness is thus unusually alert it is more easily deceived by fancies. And yet so profound was the quiet around him it seemed improbable that the faint sound he had heard as of silk very lightly brushing against some material obstacle was imaginary. Was there a listener behind that door? Or was there not? If so, it must be one as intent as himself, but far more secret.

  For a full minute, and as steadily as a cat crouching over a mouse’s hole – though there wasn’t the least trace of the predatory on his mild fair features, he scrutinized the key in the lock. He breathed again; and then with finger in book to keep his place tiptoed across the room and gently – by a mere finger’s breadth – opened the door. Another moment and he had pushed it wider. Nothing there. Exactly as he had expected, of course, and yet – why at the same moment was he both disappointed and relieved?

  He had exposed a narrow staircase – unstained, uncarpeted. Less than a dozen steep steps up was another door – a shut door, with yet another pretty flowered china handle and china finger-plates to it. A rather unusual staircase, too, he realized, since, unless one or other of its two doors were open, it must continually be in darkness. But you never know what oddity is going to present itself next in an old rambling house. How many human beings, he speculated, as he scanned this steep and narrow vacancy, must in the two or three centuries gone by have ascended and descended that narrow ladder – as abrupt as that of Jacob’s dream? They had come, disguised in the changing fashions of their time; they had gone, leaving apparently not a wrack behind.

  Well, that was that. This March morning might be speciously bright and sunny, but in spite of its sunshine it was cold. Books, too, may cheer the mind, but even when used as fuel they are apt to fail to warm the body, and rust on an empty grate diminishes any illusion of heat its bars might otherwise convey. Alan sighed, suddenly aware that something which had promised to be at least an arresting little experience had failed him. The phantasmal face so vividly seen, and even watched for a moment, had already become a little blurred in memory. And now there was a good deal more disappointment in his mind than relief. He felt like someone who has been cheated at a game he never intended to play. A particularly inappropriate simile, nonetheless, for he hadn’t the smallest notion what the stakes had been, or, for that matter, what the game. He took up his hat and walking-stick, and still almost on tiptoe, and after quietly but firmly shutting both doors behind him, went back into the shop.

  ‘I think I will take this, please,’ he said almost apologetically to the old bookseller, who with his hands under his black coat-tails was now surveying the busy world from his own doorstep.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ Mr Elliott wheeled about and accepted the volume with that sprightly turn of his podgy wrist with which he always welcomed a book that was about to leave him for ever. ‘Ah, the Hesperides, sir. I’ll put the three into one parcel. A nice tall clean copy, I see. It came, if memory serves me right, from the library of Colonel Anstey, sir, who purchased the Talbot letters – and at a very reasonable price, too. Now if I had a first in this condition! …’

  Alan dutifully smiled. ‘I found it in the parlour,’ he said. ‘What a charming little room – and garden too; I had no idea the house was so old. Who lived in it before you did? I suppose it wasn’t always a bookshop?’

  He tried in vain to speak naturally and not as if he had plums in his mouth.

  ‘Lived here before me, now?’ the bookseller repeated ruminatively. ‘Well, sir, there was first, of course, my immediate predecessor. He came before me; and we took over his stock. Something of a disappointment, too, when I came to go through with it.’

  ‘And before him?’ Alan persisted.

  ‘Before him, sir? I fancy this was what might be called a private house. You could see if you looked round a bit how it has been converted. It was a doctor’s, I understand – a Dr Marchmont’s. And what we call the parlour, sir, from which you have just emerged, was always, I take it, a sort of book room. Leastways some of the books there now were there then – with the book-plate and all. You see, the Mr Brown who came before me and who, as I say, converted the house, he bought the doctor’s library. Not merely medical and professional works neither. There was some choice stuff besides; and a few moderate specimens of what is known in the trade as the curious, sir. Not that I go out of my way for it, myself.’

  Alan paused in the doorway, parcel in hand.

  ‘A bachelor, I suppose?’

  ‘The doctor, sir, or Mr Brown?’

  ‘The doctor.’

  ‘Well, now, that I couldn’t rightly say,’ replied Mr Elliott cheerfully. ‘Let us hope not. They tell me, sir, it makes things seem more homely-like to have a female about the house. And’ – he raised his voice a little – ‘I’ll warrant that Mrs Elliott, sir, if she were here to say so, would bear me out.’

  Mrs Elliott, in fact, a pasty-looking old woman, with a mouth like a cod’s and a large marketing basket on her arm, was at this moment emerging out from behind a curtained doorway. Possibly her husband had caught a glimpse of her reflection in his spectacles. She came on with a beetle-like deliberation.

  ‘What’s that you were saying about me, Mr Elliott?’ she said.

  ‘This gentleman was inquiring, my love, if Dr Marchmont-as-was lived in a state of single blessedness or if there was a lady in the case.’

  Mrs Elliott fixed a slow, flat look on her husband, and then on Alan.

  ‘There was a sister or niece or something, so they say. But I never knew anything about them, and don’t want to,’ she declared. And Alan, a little chilled by her demeanour, left the shop.

  Not that that one fish-like glance of Mrs Elliott’s censorious eye had by any means freed his fancy of what had passed. In the days that followed he could never for an instant be sure when or where the face that reverie had somehow conjured up out of the recesses of his mind on his first visit to the old bookseller’s parlour was not about to reappear. And it chose the oddest of moments. Even when his attention was definitely fixed on other things it would waft itself into his consciousness again – and always with the same serene yet vivid, naïve yet serious question in the eyes – a question surely that only life itself could answer, and that not always with a like candour or generosity. Alan was an obstinate young man in spite of appearances. But to have the rudiments of an imagination is one thing, to be at the beck and call of every passing fancy is quite another. He was not, he reassured himself, as silly as all that. He held out for days together; and then when he had been left for twenty-four hours wholly at peace – he suddenly succumbed.

  A westering sun was sharply gilding its windows when he once more made his way into Mr Elliott’s parlour, it was empty. And almost at the same instant he realized how anxious he had been that this should be so, and how insipid a bait as such the little room now proved to be. He hadn’t expected that. And yet – not exactly insipid; its flavour had definitely soured. He wished he had never come; he tried to make up his mind to go. Ill at ease, angry with himself, and as if in open defiance of some inward mentor, he took down at random a fusty old quarto from its shelf and seating himself on a chair by the table, he began, or rather attempted, to read.

  Instead, with downcast eyes shelled in by the palm of his hand, and leaning gently on his elbow in an attitude not unlike that of the slippered and pensive Keats in the portrait, he found himself listening again. He did more than listen. Every nerve in his body was stretched taut. And time ebbed away. At this tension his mind began to wander off again into a dreamlike vacuum of its own, when, ‘What was that?’ a voice within whispered at him. A curious thrill ebbed through his body. It was as though unseen fingers had tugged at a wire – with no bell at the end o
f it. For this was no sound he had heard – no stir of the air. And yet in effect it so nearly resembled one that it might have been only the sigh of the blast of the east wind at the window. He waited a minute, then, with a slight shiver, glanced up covertly but steadily through his fingers.

  He was shocked – by what he saw – yet not astonished. It seemed as if his whole body had become empty and yet remained as inert and heavy as lead. He was no longer alone. The figure that stood before him in the darker corner there, and only a few paces away, was no less sharply visible and even more actual in effect than the objects around her. One hand, from a loose sleeve, resting on the edge of the door to the staircase, she stood looking at him, her right foot with its high-heeled shoe poised delicately on the lowest of the three steps. With head twisted back sidelong over her narrow shoulder, her eyes were fixed on this earthly visitor to her haunts – as he sat, hand to forehead, drawn up stiff and chill at the table. She was watching Alan. And the face, though with even fewer claims to be beautiful, and none to be better than knowing and wide-awake, was without any question the face he had shared with Herrick’s Hesperides.

  A peculiar vacancy – like a cold mist up from the sea – seemed to have spread over his mind, and yet he was alert to his very finger-tips. Had she seen he had seen her? He couldn’t tell. It was as cold in the tiny room as if the windows were wide open and the garden beyond them full of snow. The late afternoon light, though bleakly clear, was already thinning away, and, victim of this silly decoy, he was a prisoner who in order to regain his freedom must pass her way out. He stirred in his chair, his eyes now fixed again on the book beneath them.

  And then at last, as if with confidence restored, he withdrew his hand from his face, lifted his head, and affecting a boldness he far from felt, deliberately confronted his visitor. At this the expression on her features – her whole attitude – changed too. She had only at this moment seen that he had seen her, then? The arm dropped languidly to her side. Her listless body turned a little, her shoulders slightly lifted themselves, and a faint provocative smile came into her face, while the dark jaded eyes resting on his own remained half mocking, half deprecatory – almost as if the two of them, he and she, were old cronies who had met again after a long absence from one another, with ancient secrets awaiting discreet discussion. With a desperate effort Alan managed to refrain from making any answering signal of recognition. He stared back with a face as blank as a turnip. How he knew with such complete assurance that his visitor was not of this world he never attempted to explain to himself. Real! She was at least as real as a clearly lit reflection of anything seen in a looking-glass, and in effect on his mind was more positive than the very chair on which he was sitting and the table beneath his elbow to which that chair was drawn up. For this was a reality of the soul, and not of the senses. Indeed, he himself might be the ghost and she the dominating pervasive actuality.

  But even if he had been able to speak he had no words with which to express himself. He was shuddering with cold and had suddenly become horribly fatigued and exhausted. He wanted to ‘get out’ of all this and yet knew not only that this phantasm must have been lying in wait for him, but that sooner or later she would compel him to find out what she wanted of him, that she meant to be satisfied. Her face continued to change in expression even while he watched her. Its assurance seemed to intensify. The head stooped forward a little; the narrow, pallid, slanting eyelids momentarily closed; and then, with a gesture not merely of arm or shoulder but of her whole body, she once more fixed him with a gaze more intense, more challenging, more crammed with meaning than he had supposed possible in any human eye. It was as if some small wicket gate into the glooms of Purgatory had suddenly become thronged with bright-lit faces.

  Until this moment they had been merely eyeing one another while time’s sluggish moments ebbed away. They had been merely ‘looking at’ one another. Now there had entered those glazed dark fixed blue eyes the very self within. It stayed there gazing out at him transfixed – the pleading, tormented, dangerous spirit within that intangible husk. And then the crisis was over. With a slow dragging movement of his head Alan had at last succeeded in breaking the spell – he had turned away. A miserable disquietude and self-repulsion possessed him. He felt sick, body and soul. He had but one thought – to free himself once and for all from this unwarranted ordeal. Why should he have been singled out? What hint of any kind of ‘encouragement’ had he been responsible for? Or was this ghostly encounter an experience that had been shared by other visitors to the old bookseller’s sanctum – maybe less squeamish than himself? His chilled, bloodless fingers clenched on the open page of the book beneath them. He strove in vain to master himself, to fight the thing out. It was as if an icy hand had him in its grip, daring him to stir.

  The evening wind had died with the fading day. The three poplars, every budded double-curved twig outlined against the glassy grey of the west, stood motionless. Daylight, even dusk, was all very well, but supposing this presence, as the dark drew on, ventured a little nearer? And suddenly his alarms – as much now of the body as of the mind – were over. She had been interrupted.

  A footstep had sounded in the corridor. Alan started to his feet. The handle of the door had turned in the old brass lock; he watched it. With a jerk he twisted his head on his shoulders. He was alone. Yet again the interrupter had rattled impatiently with the door handle. Alan at last managed to respond to the summons. But even as he grasped the handle on his own side of it, the door was pushed open against him and a long-bearded face peered through.

  ‘Pardon,’ said this stranger, ‘I didn’t realize you had locked yourself in.’

  In the thin evening twilight that was now their only illumination Alan found himself blushing like a schoolgirl.

  ‘But I hadn’t,’ he stammered. ‘Of course not. The catch must have jammed. I came in here myself only a few minutes ago.’

  The long face with its rather watery blue-grey eyes placidly continued to survey him in the dusk. ‘And yet, you know,’ its owner drawled, with a soupçon of incredulity, ‘I should have guessed myself that I have been poking about in our patron’s shop out there for at least the best part of half an hour. But that, of course, is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture. You haven’t chanced, I suppose, on a copy of the Vulgar Errors – Sir Thomas Browne?’

  Alan shook his head. ‘The B’s, I think, are in that corner,’ he replied, ‘– alphabetical. But I didn’t notice the Errors.’

  Nor did he stay to help his fellow-customer find the volume. He hurried out, and this time he had no spoil to present to the old bookseller in recognition of the rent due for his occupation of the parlour.

  A whole week went by, its last few days the battleground of a continuous conflict of mind. He hadn’t, he assured himself with the utmost conviction, the faintest desire in the world to set eyes again on – on what he had set eyes on. That was certain. It had been the oddest of shocks to what he had thought about things, to what had gone before, and, yes, to his vanity. Besides, the more he occupied himself with and pondered over his peculiar little experience the more probable it seemed that it and she and everything connected with her had been nothing but a cheat of the senses, a triumph of self-deception – a pure illusion, induced by the quiet, the solitude, the stirrings of springtime at the window, the feeling of age in the room, the romantic associations – and last, to the Herrick!

  All this served very well in the middle of the morning or at two o’clock in the afternoon. But a chance waft of the year’s first waxen hyacinths, the onset of evening, a glimpse of the waning moon – at any such oblique reminder of what had happened, these pretty arguments fell flat as a house of cards. Illusion! Then why had everything else in his life become by comparison so empty of interest and himself at a loose end? The thought of Mr Elliott’s bookshop at such moments was like an hypnotic lure. Cheat himself as he might, he knew it was only cheating. Distrust the fowler as he might, he knew what nets he was in. How
gross a folly to be at the mercy of one vehement coupling of glances. If only it had been that other face! And yet, supposing he were wrong about all this; supposing this phantasm really was in need of help, couldn’t rest, had come back for something – there were things one might want to come back for – and even for something which he alone could give?

  What wonder this restless conflict of mind reacted on his body and broke his sleep? Naturally a little invalidish in his appetite, Alan now suffered the pangs of a violent attack of indigestion. And at last he could endure himself no longer. On the following Tuesday he once more pushed open the outer door of Mr Elliott’s bookshop, with its jangling bell, and entered, hot and breathless, from out of the pouring rain.

  ‘There was a book I caught sight of,’ he panted out to the old gentleman as he came in, ‘when I was here last, you know. In the other room. I won’t keep you a minute.’

  At this, the bookseller’s bland eye fixed itself an instant on the fair flushed face, almost as if he too could a tale unfold.

  ‘Let me take your umbrella, sir,’ he entreated. ‘Sopping! A real downpour. But very welcome to the farmers, I’ll be bound – if for once in a while they’d only say so. No hurry whatever, sir.’

  Downpour indeed it was. As Alan entered the parlour the cold, sullen gush of rain on the young lilac buds and cobblestones of the little yard in the dreary leaden light at the window resounded steadily on. He had set out in the belief that his one desire was to prove that his ‘ghost’ was no ghost at all, that he had been the victim of a pure hallucination. Yet throughout his journey, with only his umbrella for company, he had been conscious of a thrill of excitement and expectation. And now that he had closed the door behind him, and had shut himself in, the faded little room in this obscurity at once began to influence his mind in much the same fashion as the livid gloom of an approaching thunderstorm affects the scenery of the hills and valleys over which it broods.