Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales

by Walter De la Mare

  The slate-grey eyes peered out dark with anger from behind the glass of their spectacles. ‘Subject?’

  ‘It has escaped your memory, it seems. Read your own handbills then. “The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe”.’

  ‘That is a quibble.’

  ‘It is essential. Your better nature gave you the title of your paper. Your worse followed the easier, the more appetizing, the more popular, the charnel-house treatment of your theme.’

  A pallor almost as extreme as that of his visitor had spread over Professor Monk’s features. A hatred of this stranger, a hatred not the less bitter for being now innocent of contempt, was stirring in his mind. His glance fell from the fixed eyes to the thin satirical lips and thence to the delicate hands, but he realized that this petty effort to appear indifferent had woefully failed him. ‘I consider,’ he managed to say, in a low, hardly articulate voice, ‘I consider this is an outrage and an insult.’

  ‘That may well be so,’ responded his visitor, with a hardly perceptible shrug of his cloaked shoulder. ‘And I believe if your poet were here – I mean, professor, in the flesh – that he too would not hesitate to agree with you. But let us be honest for a moment. Apart from other writers – Thomas Lovell Beddoes and a Miss Brontë – you mentioned James Clarence Mangan, hinting that possibly Poe himself definitely stole, cheated him of his technique. Did you produce one single syllable in proof of this? And if you had, when, may I ask you, were poets forbidden to gild the silver they borrow? You said that Poe shared with these writers something of their dreams, their visions, their frail hopes and aspirations. How far did you inform us regarding the meaning, the source, the value and reality, quite apart from the fascination of those dreams? Poe’s complete mortal existence was a conflict with his woe of spirit, his absorption in death and the grave, his horror of the solitude of the soul, of the nightmares that ascended on him like vultures from out of the pit of hell when he lay on his hospital death bed. What do you know of these? What will your listeners find of comfort, of reassurance in your academic mouthings and nothings when they come to face their terrors of the mind, that unshatterable solitude?

  ‘My only speculation is not concerning which of the authors you mentioned you know least about, but what conceivable satisfaction you found in reading their books. And believe me, my dear professor, your groping remarks on poetic technique were nothing short of fatuous. Not only can you never have written a line of verse yourself, unless perhaps as an inky schoolboy you thumped out a molossus or a spondee or two on your desk, but you can never even have read with any insight the poet’s essay on the subject. Indeed, what is your definition of poetry? Did you refer to his? It is deplorable enough that you have confused the imagination, that sovereign power, that divine energy, with a mere faculty. Reason, yes. But is not man’s feeblest taper, like the sun itself in heaven, a dual splendour – of heat and light? Are you aware that you made no use of the word intellect, or divination, or afflatus, ay, and worse, even music? Did not Poe himself maintain that “in enforcing a truth, we must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical”? That, you may claim, was a mood you endeavoured to share. But did he never share it? Was opium or Hippocrene his aid in that? How then can you justify your commendation of that vain piping wiseacre Emerson, who in his own practice suggested that poetry is skim-milk philosophy and flowery optimism cut up into metre, and dismissed all else as jingle? Or your halfhearted rejection of Mr Henry James’s shallow gibe, “very superficial verse”. Is beauty the less admirable because it is skin deep? I know little of Mr James, but assume from what you yourself said of him that one might as justly dismiss his fiction as sillily super-subtle psychology. Was he a devotee of the Muses – of Music? Music, let me quote again, “music when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.”’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Ah! Is it sense or nonsense?’

  ‘I had an hour,’ muttered the professor tartly, ‘not all night.’

  ‘And what virtual service,’ continued his visitor more genially, ‘is there in comparing poems different in aim, in kind, and in quality? Has not even the ass its own niche in the universe? Is not every work of art – yes, even your own lecture – something single, unique; and are these precious comparisons anything better than mere mental exercises? Heaven forbid, and heaven forbids much, that I should legislate in such matters. My mere question is, how can you? Believe me, while what you told us of creative insight – invention as you called it – might set any sensitive human heart aching with despair, your remarks on the art of writing were nothing short of a treason to the mind. They were based on inadequate knowledge, and all but innocent of common-sense. Have you ever read that Poe never laughed? Perhaps not. And you had no reason to notice that one at least of your listeners refrained even from smiling, though on my soul I can imagine no moment in which he would be more bitterly tempted to indulge in the cachinnation of fools than in this.

  ‘“Questions” – questions! I awaited in vain the faintest intimation that our poet was perhaps the first of his kind to foresee the triumphs and the tyranny of modern science; that he was no mere groping novice in astronomy, physics, and the science of the mind. Creature of darkness his imagination may have been: but was there no light in his mind? If you could meet him face to face, professor, at this moment, here, now – I ask you, I entreat you to confide in me, would you deny him the light of his Reason? Would you? You might even try to forgive his extravagances, his miseries; you might even agree that even four-score years of purgation could hardly serve to annul the habits of a lifetime; and that yet in spite of his discordant nature, his self-isolation, he was happier in the solitary company of his own miserable soul than … But I must refrain from being wearisome. I will burden you with but one more quotation:

  ‘“We have still a thirst unquenchable … It belongs to the immortality of man … It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above … to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone …”

  ‘Those tears, then, that respond to poetry and music are not from “excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.” These words, professor, though you are evidently unaware of it, were Edgar Allan Poe’s. And I – I myself have as yet found no reason to retract the conviction of their truth.’

  Professor Monk’s apprehension that his visitor, if not positively insane, was far from ‘normal’, had become a certainty. Their eyes, or rather the sentinels that look out of them, had met again. Who goes there? they had cried one on the other. And again it was the professor’s that had returned no countersign. But dislike – a transitory hatred even – of his censor had fallen away into a sort of incredulity. That he should have consented to such a catechism. That a mere lecture should have led to this! He had been hardly troubling indeed to follow the meaning of the last remarks he had heard. His sole resource was to mutter that though he was grateful for his visitor’s suggestions, it was clear that they would never see eye to eye in these matters, that the hour was growing late, and that he must be gone. He even managed to grimace a slant but not unkindly smile. ‘We live in two worlds,’ he said, ‘you and I, and I fear we shall never agree. Nonetheless, and though you prefer to doubt it, I share your interest and delight in poetry, and, within strict limits, your admiration of Poe.’ He cast a forlorn glance towards his hat perched in solitude upon a chair. ‘We shall at least, I hope,’ he added, ‘part friends.’

  ‘So be it,’ replied his visitor, drawing his cloak more closely around him, raising slowly his hea
vy head.

  ‘The cock he hadna crawed but once,

  And clapped his wings at a’,

  Whan the youngest to the eldest said,

  Brother we must awa’…

  ‘I also must be gone. We have met by chance. Let us not make it a fatality. By just such a chance indeed as that in your dreams tonight you may find yourself in regions such as our poet described, and may not, I fear, find much comfort in them. So, too, this evening, I found myself – well, here: in a region, that is, which it is your own excellent fortune to occupy and which is yet of little comfort to me. Is there not a shade of the Satanic in these streets? But what are waking and dreaming, my dear sir? Mere states of consciousness; as too in a sense is this, your world of what you call the actual, and the one that may await you. Opinions, views, passing tastes, passing prejudices – they are like funguses, a growth of the night. But the moon of the imagination, however fickle in her phases, is still constant in her borrowed light, and sheds her beams on them one and all, the just and the unjust. We may meet again.’

  The dark, saturnine head had trembled a little, the weak yet stubborn mouth had stirred into a faint smile as the stranger thrust out an ungloved hand from beneath his cloak over the varnished wood of the table. Professor Monk hesitated, but only for a moment. Critic though he might be, and so not by impulse a man of action, he was neither timid nor unforgiving. His fingers met an instant the outstretched hand, and instantly withdrew, not because he had regretted the friendly action, but because of the piercing cold that had run through his veins at this brief contact. A sigh shook him from head to foot. A slight vertigo overcame him. He raised his hand to his eyes. For an instant it seemed as though even his sense of reality had cheated him – had foundered.

  And when he looked out into the world again his visitor had left him. At last he was indeed alone. He stayed a moment, still dazed, and staring at nothing. Then he glanced at his mute typescript on the table, and then furtively into the grate. He paused, musing. His fingers fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, but encountered only a penknife. It was in part with a penknife, and when seated in his winter house before a burning fire, that King Jehoiakim had destroyed the Prophet Jeremiah’s manuscript. But though, unlike the angel’s little book in Revelations, the professor’s paper was no longer sweet on his tongue, and there were a few dead coals at hand, he had no matches. His evening had wearied him, but this vile altercation seemed to have sapped his very life. Had he changed his views concerning the genius of Poe as a writer? – not by one iota. As a man? He had always, he realized, disliked and distrusted him; now he hated him. But this was immaterial. An absurd conviction of his own futility had shaken and shocked him. Life itself is a thing of moments, the last being its momentary apex. And now he felt as dead and empty as some sad carcass suspended eviscerated from a butcher’s hook. By a piece of mere legerdemain in this cold and hideous room his view of himself and even of his future had completely changed. The pattern in the kaleidoscope – was that then nothing but a trick? A few dull fallen fragments of glass now, and no pattern at all? Being a man of habit and purpose and precision, Professor Monk was well aware that a drug, however potent, and whatever its origin, wears out at length its own effects. So with this evening’s enterprise; he might, he would, soon be his own man again. But meanwhile … well, he would await the morrow, when perhaps his second thoughts would be less impetuous – and he himself less hideously cold.

  He stooped awkwardly for his hat, and as he did so caught a glimpse of the little wizened, warty, bent-up old caretaker peering in at the doorway. ‘Ah, there you are, sir,’ he was assuring him, with the utmost friendliness. ‘I was beginning to think you had passed out without my seeing you. They do sometimes. No hurry, sir.’ Professor Monk hesitated; then paused; while yet again the adjacent foundry discarded its slag.

  ‘Which way did that – er – gentleman go?’ he inquired.

  ‘Gentleman, sir? I’ve set eyes on no gentleman. Except for one of them saucy young schoolgirls from St Ann’s half an hour ago, I see them all come along out together like rain out of a gutter-pipe. And the Reverend Mortimer hard at heel after them. It’s fine now, sir, and starry, but the wind’s rising. I have been talking with a friend.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Thank you!’ replied the professor. But it was well under his breath that he repeated, ‘Ah, yes.’

  THE GUARDIAN

  There are, I am well aware, many excellent people in this world who shun anything in the nature of the tragic in connection with children. And particularly if it carries with it what they consider to be a strain of morbidity. My own conviction, nonetheless, is that childhood is a state of extremes; alike of happiness and of unhappiness. And I speak from my own knowledge – derived from observation and experience long before this ‘psychiatry’ became a craze – when I say, not only that some of the saddest, gravest, most dreadful and most profound experiences in life may occur in our earliest years, but that, if they do, the effects of them in after-life persist.

  I am not a mother. I am what is called ‘an old maid’; but even ‘old maids’, I assume, are entitled to their convictions.

  I might first explain that I am the last of my family. In my earlier years I had three sisters. Philip was the only son – and a posthumous child – of the youngest of them – Rachel. And his mother was the only one of us to marry. What opportunities the others had to follow her example is nothing here to the point. At all events, they remained single. My sister’s choice was a tragic one; her head was at the mercy of her heart. Her husband was a man who may be described in one word: he was wicked. He was selfish, malicious and vindictive, and the moment I saw him I warned my sister against him. But in vain. He failed even to contrive to die respectably. I mention this merely because his character may have some bearing on what I have to relate. But what, I can hardly say.

  Philip was born three months after his father’s death. In spite of the grief and affliction which my poor sister had endured during the brief period of her married life, there appeared to be nothing amiss with him. Nature goes her own way. He was a quiet and tractable child, although he was subject to occasional outbreaks of passion and naughtiness. He was what is called a winning little boy, and I loved him very dearly. He was small for his age and slenderly built. In his earlier years his hair, and he had a long and narrow head, was of a pale gold – straw-coloured in fact; but it darkened later to a pretty lightish brown, and was very fine. Hairdressers frequently remarked on this. He had a small nose, and deep-set but clear grey eyes of a colour seldom seen in company with that coloured hair. He looked delicate, but was in fact not so.

  This appearance – and he was by nature a sensitive and solitary child – suggested effeminacy. But since in his case it implied only fineness and delicacy of mind as well as of body, it was nothing but a tribute to him. I consider it a poor compliment to a woman, at any rate, to be regarded as mannish and masculine. Let us all keep to what we are and as much of it as possible. On this account, however, I counselled his mother to send him to no school until he was in his ninth year. She herself was inclined to be indulgent. Still, I am a great believer in the influence of a good home-life on a young child. Affection is by no means always a flawless mentor; but I know no better. And as my sister, still a young woman, had been left badly off, I had the pleasure and privilege of paying for Philip’s education.

  I selected an excellent young governess with a character. She taught him, five mornings a week, and with ease, the usual elements; and I especially advised her to keep as far as possible to the practical side of things. His own nature and temperament would supply him with the romantic. And that I regarded with misgiving. Later, he was sent to what an old friend of mine assured me was a school – a preparatory school – where even a sensitive and difficult child might have at least every opportunity of doing well and of being happy.

  His first reports – and I had myself insisted on being taken over the whole school, scullery to attics, and on having a few
words alone with the matron – were completely promising. Indeed, in his third term, Philip won a prize for good conduct – a prize that in these days, I regret to hear, is disparaged, even sneered at. Not that rewards of this kind are necessarily an enduring advantage – even to the clever. Much depends, naturally, on what is meant by goodness.

  Now, in my view, it is a mistake to screen and protect even a young child too closely. Mind; I say, too closely. I am no believer in cosseting. A child has to face life. For this he has been given his own defences and resources. Needless to add, I am not defending carelessness or stupidity. I remember seeing at a children’s party a little girl in a flimsy muslin frock and pale blue ribbons – a pretty little creature, too – who exhibited every symptom of approaching measles. Shivery, languid, feverish, running at the eyes and nose – the usual thing: and I kept her by me and I warned her nurse. But it was too late. Thirteen children at that one small party eventually fell victims to this stupidity. As with risks to physical health, so with mental ailments and weaknesses.

  Night fears and similar bogies may be introduced into a young and innocent mind by a silly nurse-maid or by too harsh a discipline, or perhaps by an obscure inheritance. They may also be natural weeds. When I was a girl, even I myself was not entirely immune from them. I dreaded company, for example; was shy of speaking my own mind, and of showing affection. I used both to despise and to envy the delicate – the demonstrative; and even on a summer’s day was always least happy in the twilight. Least at home. The dark, on the other hand, had no terrors for me. As events proved, such fears not only affected Philip a good deal more than they affect most children, but with a peculiar difference. Indeed, I have never since encountered a similar case.

  Towards the end of December in that year he came as usual to spend his Christmas holidays with me. This was an arrangement with which my sister willingly complied. But I had only suggested it; I never made demands. His trunk was taken up to his bedroom, and we sat down to tea, at which my cook, who had been many years in my service, provided for him a lightly-boiled egg – and I have never encountered even an old man who did not regard a boiled egg with his tea as a delicacy! As he sat facing me at the tea-table and in the full light of the lamp, I noticed at once that he looked more than usually pale. His face was even a little drawn and haggard. And ‘haggard’ is hardly a word one would willingly use in relation to a child. But it is the right word. Moreover, his clear but wearied eyes were encircled with bluish, tell-tale shadows. That meant bad nights!