Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales

by Walter De la Mare

  This E.F., whoever she was, had often sat in this room, alert, elated, drinking in its rosily reflected morning sunshine from that wall, happy in being merely herself, young, alone, and alive. He could even watch in fancy that intense lowered face as she stitched steadily on, lost in a passionate reverie, while she listened to as dismal a downpour as that which had but lately ceased on the moss-grown cobbles under the window. ‘It’s only one’s inmost self that matters,’ she had scribbled at the end of one of her rhymes. And then – how long afterwards? – the days, empty of everything but that horror and dryness of the heart, when desire had corrupted and hope was gone, and every hour of solitude must have seemed to be lying in wait only to prove the waste, the bleakness, the desolation to which the soul within can come. No doubt in time they would learn even a bookworm to be a worm. ‘That is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture’, as the bland, bearded, supercilious gentleman had expressed it. But he wouldn’t have sentimentalized about it.

  Oddly enough, it hadn’t yet occurred to Alan to speculate what kind of human being it was to whom so many of these poems had been addressed, and to whom seemingly every one of them had clearer or vaguer reference. There are ghosts for whom spectre is the better word. In this, the gloomiest hour of an English spring, he glanced again at the door he had shut behind him in positive hope that it might yet open once more – that he was not so utterly alone as he seemed. Sick: sick: surely, surely a few years of life could not have wreaked such horrifying changes in any human face and spirit as that!

  But the least promising method apparently of evoking a visitant from another world is to wait on to welcome it. Better, perhaps, postpone any little experiment of this kind until after the veils of nightfall have descended. Not that he had failed to notice how overwhelming is the evidence that when once you have gone from this world you have gone for ever. Still, even if he had been merely the victim of an illusion, it would have been something just to smile or to nod in a common friendly human fashion, to lift up the dingy little black exercise book in his hand, merely to show that its owner had not confided in him in vain.

  He was an absurdly timid creature – tongue-tied when he wanted most to express himself. And yet, if only … His glance strayed from door to book again. It was curious that the reading of poems like these should yet have proved a sort of solace. They had triumphed even over the miserable setting destiny had bestowed on them. Surely lit-er-a-ture without any vestige of merit in it couldn’t do that. A veil of day-dream drew over the fair and rather effeminate face. And yet the young man was no longer merely brooding; he was beginning to make plans. And he was making them without any help from the source from which it might have been expected.

  Seeming revenants, of course, in this busy world are not of much account. They make indelible impressions if they do chance to visit one, though it is imprudent, perhaps, to share them with the sceptic. Nonetheless at this moment he was finding it almost impossible to recall the face not of the photograph but of his phantasm. And though there was nothing in the earlier poems he had read to suggest that they could not have been the work of the former, was it conceivable that they could ever have been the work of – that other one? But why not! To judge from some quite famous poets’ faces their owners would have flourished at least as successfully in the pork-butchering line. Herrick himself – well, he was not exactly ethereal in appearance. But what need for these ridiculous unanswerable questions? Whoever E.F. had been, and whatever the authorship of the poems, he himself could at least claim now to be their only re-begetter.

  At this thought a thrill of excitement had run through Alan’s veins. Surely the next best thing to publishing a first volume of verse of one’s own – and that he had now decided never to attempt – is to publish someone else’s. He had seen worse stuff than this in print, and on hand-made paper, too. Why shouldn’t he turn editor? How could one tell for certain that it is impossible to comfort – or, for that matter, to soothe the vanity of – some poor soul simply because it has happened to set out on the last long journey a few years before oneself? Mere initials are little short of anonymity, and even kindred spirits may be all the kinder if kept at the safe distance which anonymity ensures. But what about the old bookseller? An Englishman’s shop is his castle, and this battered old exercise book, Alan assumed, must fully as much as any other volume on the shelves around him be the legal property of the current tenant of the house. Or possibly the ground-landlord’s? He determined to take Mr Elliott into his confidence – but very discreetly.

  With this decision, he got up – dismayed to discover that it was now a full half-hour after closing time. Nonetheless he found the old bookseller sitting at his table and apparently lost to the cares of business beneath a wire-protected gas bracket now used for an electric bulb. The outer door was still wide open, and the sullen clouds of the last of evening seemed to have descended even more louringly over the rain-soaked streets. A solitary dog lopped by the shrouded entrance. Not a sound pierced the monotony of the drizzle.

  ‘I wonder,’ Alan began, keeping the inflexions of his voice well in check, ‘I wonder if you have ever noticed this particular book? It is in manuscript … Verse.’

  ‘Verse, sir?’ said the bookseller, fumbling in a tight waistcoat pocket for the silver case of his second pair of spectacles. ‘Well, now, verse – in manuscript. That doesn’t sound as if it’s likely to be of much value, though finds there have been, I grant you. Poems and sermons – we are fairly glutted out with them nowadays; still, there was this Omar Khayyám fuss, sir, so you never know.’

  He adjusted his spectacles and opened the book where the book opened itself. Alan stooped over the old man’s shoulder and read with him:

  Once in kind arms, alas, you held me close;

  Sweet to its sepals was the unfolding rose.

  Why, then – though wind-blown, hither, thither,

  I languish still, rot on, and wither

  Yet live, God only knows.

  A queer, intent, an almost hunted expression drew over Mr Elliott’s greyish face as he read on.

  ‘Now I wonder,’ he said at last, firmly laying the book down again and turning an eye as guileless as an infant’s to meet Alan’s scrutiny, ‘I wonder now who could have written that? Not that I flatter myself to be much of a judge. I leave that to my customers, sir.’

  ‘There is an E.F. cut out on the cover,’ said Alan, ‘and’ – the words came with difficulty – ‘there is a photograph inside. But then, I suppose,’ he added hastily, automatically putting out his hand for the book and withdrawing it again, ‘I suppose just a loose photograph doesn’t prove anything. Not at least to whom it belonged – the book, I mean.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the bookseller, as if he thoroughly enjoyed little problems of this nature; ‘in a manner of speaking I suppose it don’t.’ But he made no attempt to find the photograph, and a rather prolonged pause followed.

  ‘It’s quiet in that room in there,’ Alan managed to remark at last. ‘Extraordinarily quiet. You haven’t yourself, I suppose, ever noticed the book before?’

  Mr Elliott removed both pairs of spectacles from the bridge of his nose. ‘Quiet is the word, sir,’ he replied, in a voice suiting the occasion. ‘And it’s quieter yet in the two upper rooms above it. Especially of a winter’s evening. Mrs Elliott and me don’t use that part of the house much, though there is a good bit of lumber stowed away in the nearest of ’em. We can’t sell more than a fraction of the books we get, sir, so we store what’s over up there for the pulpers. I doubt if I have even so much as seen the inside of the other room these six months past. As a matter of fact’ – he pursed his mouth and nodded – ‘what with servant-girls and the like, and not everybody being as commonsensical as most, we don’t mention it much.’

  The bookseller’s absent eye was now fixed on the rain-soaked street, and Alan waited, leaving his ‘What?’ unsaid.

  ‘You see, sir, the lady that lived with Dr Marchmont here – his niece, or war
d, or whatever it may be – well, they say she came to what they call an untimely end. A love affair. But there, for the matter of that you can’t open your evening newspaper without finding more of such things than you get in a spring season’s fiction. Strychnine, sir – that was the way of it; and it isn’t exactly the poison I myself should choose for the purpose. It erects up the body like an arch, sir. So.’ With a gesture of his small, square hand Mr Elliott pictured the effect in the air. ‘Dr Marchmont hadn’t much of a practice by that time, I understand; but I expect he came to a pretty sudden standstill when he saw that on the bed. A tall man, sir, with a sharp nose.’

  Alan refrained from looking at the bookseller. His eyes stayed fixed on the doorway which led out into the world beyond, and they did not stir. But he had seen the tall dark man with the sharp nose as clearly as if he had met him face to face, and was conscious of a repulsion far more deadly than the mere features would seem to warrant. And yet; why should he have come to a ‘standstill’ quite like that if …? But the bookseller had opened the fusty, mildewed book at another page. He sniffed, then having rather pernicketily adjusted his spectacles, read over yet another of the poems:

  Esther! came whisper from my bed.

  Answer me, Esther – are you there?

  ’Twas waking self to self that’s dead

  Called on the empty stair.

  Stir not that pit; she is lost and gone

  A Jew decoyed her to her doom.

  Sullenly knolls her passing bell

  Mocking me in the gloom.

  The old man gingerly turned the leaf, and read on:

  Last evening, as I sat alone –

  Thimble on finger, needle and thread –

  Light dimming as the dusk drew on,

  I dreamed that I was dead.

  Like wildering timeless plains of snow

  Which bitter winds to ice congeal

  The world stretched far as sight could go

  ’Neath skies as hard as steel.

  Lost in that nought of night I stood

  And watched my body – brain and breast

  In dreadful anguish – in the mould

  Grope to’rd its final rest.

  Its craving dreams of sense dropped down

  Like crumbling maggots in the sod:

  Spectral, I stood; all longing gone,

  Exiled from hope and God.

  And you I loved, who once loved me,

  And shook with pangs this mortal frame,

  Were sunk to such an infamy

  That when I called your name,

  Its knell so racked that sentient clay

  That my lost spirit lurking near,

  Wailed, liked the damned, and fled away –

  And woke me, stark with Fear.

  He pondered a moment, turned back the leaf again, and holding the book open with his dumpy forefinger, ‘A Jew, now,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I never heard any mention of a Jew. But what, if you follow me,’ he added, tapping on the open page with his spectacles, ‘what I feel about such things as these is that they’re not so much what may be called mournful as morbid, sir. They rankle. I don’t say, mind you, there isn’t a ring of truth in them – but it’s so put, if you follow me, as to make it worse. Why, if all our little mistakes were dealt with in such a vengeful spirit as this – as this, where would any of us be? And death … Say things out, sir, by all means. But what things? It isn’t human nature. And what’s more,’ he finished pensively, ‘I haven’t noticed that the stuff sells much the better for it.’

  Alan had listened but had not paid much attention to these moralizings. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that you think the book did actually belong to the lady who lived here, and that – that it was she herself who wrote the poems? But then, you see, it’s E.F. on the cover, and I thought you said the name was Marchmont?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Marchmont. Between you and me, there was a Mrs, I understand; but she went away. And who this young woman was I don’t rightly know. Not much good, I fancy. At least –’ He emptily eyed again the blurred lettering of the poem. ‘But there, sir,’ he went on with decision, ‘there’s no need that I can see to worry about that. The whole thing’s a good many years gone, and what consequence is it now? You’d be astonished how few of my customers really care who wrote a book so long as wrote it was. Which is not to suggest that if we get someone – someone with a name, I mean – to lay out the full story of the young woman as a sort of foreword, there might not be money in it. There might be. It doesn’t much signify nowadays what you say about the dead, not legally, I mean. And especially these poets, sir. It all goes in under “biography”. Besides, a suicide’s a suicide all the world over. On the other hand’ – and he glanced over his shoulder – ‘I rather fancy Mrs E. wouldn’t care to be mixed up in the affair. What she reads she never much approves of, though that’s the kind of reading she likes best. The ladies can be so very scrupulous.’

  Alan had not seen the old bookseller in quite so bright a light as this before.

  ‘What I was wondering, Mr Elliott,’ he replied in tones so frigid they suggested he was at least twenty years older than he appeared to be, ‘is whether you would have any objection to my sending the book myself to the printers. It’s merely an idea. One can’t tell. It could do no harm. Perhaps whoever it was who wrote the poems may have hoped some day to get them printed – you never know. It would be at my expense, of course. I shouldn’t dream of taking a penny piece and I would rather there were no introduction – by anyone. There need be no name or address on the title-page, need there? But this is, of course, only if you see no objection?’

  Mr Elliott had once more lifted by an inch or two the back cover of the exercise book, as if possibly in search of the photograph. He found only this pencilled scrawl:

  Well, well, well! squeaked the kitten to the cat;

  Mousie refuses to play any more! so that’s the end of that!

  He shut up the book and rested his small plump hand on it.

  ‘I suppose, sir,’ he inquired discreetly, ‘there isn’t any risk of any infringement of copyright? I mean,’ he added, twisting round his unspectacled face a little in Alan’s direction, ‘there isn’t likely to be anybody who would recognize what’s in here? I am not, of course, referring to the photograph, but a book, even nowadays, may be what you may call too true-spoken – when it’s new, I mean. And it’s not so much Mrs E. I have in mind now as the police’ – he whispered the word – ‘the police.’

  Alan returned his blurred glance without flinching.

  ‘Oh, no …’ he said. ‘Besides, I should merely put E.F. on the title-page and say it had been printed privately. I am quite prepared to take the risk.’

  The cold tones of the young man seemed to have a little daunted the old bookseller.

  ‘Very well, sir. I will have just a word with a young lawyer friend of mine, and if that’s all right, why, sir, you are welcome.’

  ‘And the books could be sold from here?’

  ‘Sold? Why, yes, sir – they’ll have plenty of respectable company, at any rate.’

  But if Alan had guilelessly supposed that the mere signing of a cheque for £33 10s. in settlement of a local printer’s account would finally exile a ghost that now haunted his mind far more persistently than it could ever have haunted Mr Elliott’s green parlour, he soon discovered his mistake. He had kept the photograph, but had long since given up any attempt to find his way through the maze in which he found himself. Why, why, should he concern himself with what an ill-starred life had done to that young face? If the heart, if the very soul is haunted by a ghost, need one heed the frigid dictates of the mind? Infatuated young man, he was in servitude to one who had left the world years before he was born, and had left it, it seemed, only the sweeter by her exit. He was sick for love of one who was once alive but was now dead, and – why should he deny it? Mrs E. wouldn’t! – damned.

  Still, except by way of correspondence he avoided Mr Elliott and his parlour
for weeks, until, in fact, the poems were finally in print, until their neat grey deckled paper covers had been stitched on, and the copies were ready for a clamorous public! So it was early one morning in the month of June before he once more found himself in the old bookseller’s quiet annexe. The bush of lilac, stirred by the warm, languid breeze at the window, was shaking free its faded once-fragrant tassels of bloom and tapering heart-shaped leaves from the last dews of night. The young poplars stood like gold-green torches against the blue of the sky. A thrush was singing somewhere out of sight. It was a scene worthy of Arcady.

  Alan had trailed through life without any positive need to call on any latent energy he might possess. And now that he had seen through the press his first essay in publishing a reaction had set in. A cloud of despondency shadowed his young features as he stared out through the glass of the window. Through the weeks gone by he had been assuring himself that it was no more than an act of mere decency to get the poems into print. A vicarious thirty pounds or so, just to quiet his conscience. What reward was even thinkable? And yet but a few nights before he had found himself sitting up in bed in the dark of the small hours just as if there had come a tap upon the panel of his door or a voice had summoned him out of dream. He had sat up, leaning against his bed-rail, exhausted by his few hours’ broken sleep. And in the vacancy of his mind had appeared yet again in silhouette against the dark the living presentment of the young face in the photograph. Merely the image of a face floating there, with waxen downcast lids, the features passive as those of a death-mask – as unembodied an object as the after-image of a flower. There was no speculation in the downcast eyes, and in that lovely, longed-for face; no, nothing whatever for him – and it had faded out as a mirage of green-fronded palm trees and water fades in the lifeless sands of the desert.

  He hadn’t any desire to sleep again that night. Dreams might come; and wakeful questions pestered him. How old was she when the first of the poems was written? How old when no more came, and she herself had gone on – gone on? That barren awful road of disillusionment, satiety, self-disdain. Had she even when young and untroubled ever been happy? Was what she had written even true? How far are poems true? What had really happened? What had been left out? You can’t even tell – yourself – what goes on in the silent places of your mind when you have swallowed, so to speak, the dreadful outside things of life. What, for example, had Measure for Measure to do with the author of Venus and Adonis, and what Don Juan with Byron as a child? One thing, young women of his own day didn’t take their little affairs like that. They kept life in focus. But that ghost! The ravages, the paint, the insidiousness, the very clothes!