Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Publication was his intention,’ he replied, ‘and not merely to do as you suggest.’ But he wished the accents in which he had uttered this confession had not sounded as if he were a company promoter apologizing for a balance sheet.

  ‘In other words, Mr Forbes, I am to understand, then, that your visit to me today is not solely with a view to the success of this young man’s university studies? You, too, have come to see me – not, of course, on your own behalf, but in kindness to your friend – in order to glean what you can of my son’s personal and private affairs?’

  The challenge was unmistakable. It rang out like a trumpet, and Ronnie could neither smile now nor reply. He moistened his lips. Though of late years more and more easily bored, he was still interested in human nature. The poet’s mother had proved to be of a type he seldom encountered even on the outskirts of his ordinary orbit. He dearly enjoyed, too, a battle of wits. But this was hardly ‘wits’, and he was as yet uncertain exactly where he himself was likely to remain – on which side of the fence, that is. All he could blurt out at last sounded much less pacifying than he intended to make it.

  ‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I don’t entirely agree with you. I mean on the principle of the thing. Surely, Mrs Cotton, the publication of a book implies that the author of it is to that degree sharing himself with the world at large. Poetry in particular. He puts into print what he wouldn’t confide in secret even to his closest friend. It is a confessional wide as the heavens! Within certain limits, then, isn’t the world at large justified in being interested not merely in him as a writer but as a human being? I agree that this can go too far, that it usually does, in fact. Mere prying curiosity is odious. And there’s no need to be vulgar. But how can one separate entirely a man from his work, and especially if the one is, as it were, explanatory of the other? Besides’ – he took the fence that offered itself in one sprightly bound – ‘one doesn’t have to be a Paul Pry to be grateful, say, for William Shakespeare’s second-best bed.’

  Mrs Cotton smoothed down her unmodishly long skirts over her lap. She, too, paused with stooping head, as if listening, or as if her thoughts had wandered. Then once again she openly faced him.

  ‘In a moment or two I shall be ready and perfectly willing, Mr Forbes,’ she assured him, ‘to answer any question you like to ask me. I won’t say that I agree either in principle or in detail with what you have said. And – though I can only guess how dreadfully ignorant it must sound – I know nothing whatever about William Shakespeare’s second-best bed. Weren’t beds very expensive in those days? I seem to have read that somewhere. But all this apart, I should like to consider you, if I may, not only as a confidant, but as a friend. That being so, first, I propose to make a little private confession. Please listen to me as patiently as you can.’

  All Ronnie’s native gallantry had mounted into his head at this appeal. For the first time for years he was the victim of an enlarged heart. He composed himself to listen.

  ‘You must realize in the first place that I know very little about books and nothing whatever about poetry. I am not even a great reader; indeed if I were, that would be quite another question. Poetry is not in me, it is not in my family. As a child I detested it, the very word. I was therefore made to learn as much of it as a stupid governess could make me. I see myself at this moment, with tear-grimed cheeks and nose flattened to my nursery window, looking out on a world of rain and wind, and some thumbed, dog’s-eared, horrid little book of poetry clutched in my grubby paw, containing not only poems, mind, definitely intended to do me good, but such famous pieces as “Piping down the valleys wild”, and “The Assyrian came down”. That kind of thing. Well, I hated them all with an almost physical hatred. Which merely means, I suppose, that even as a child I was of a practical and matter-of-fact turn of mind. But that, I believe, is true of many young children. As we are, so we remain; at least in deficiency of mind: it is a dreadful consideration, Mr Forbes. Whether interest in poetry and in works of the imagination would ever have been mine in happier circumstances I cannot say. I can only confess that it never has. My husband was precisely the opposite, and my son, spared, in his childhood at least, the thorns and thistles which the little donkey that I used to be discovered in what I was fed on, took after him.

  ‘I have heard of mothers, Mr Forbes, who have been jealous of the love and intimacy between a child and its father. That’s beyond my understanding. But when my husband died, I was for many years my son’s only real company. You can be delicate in spirit as well as in body – a delicacy, I mean, that is nonetheless the very reverse of weakness. So, you see, as time went on, he was practically compelled to confide in me. Apart from the craving to express oneself – though that, too, is not in me – little though you may be supposing it just now! – there is the craving to share what comes of it, afterwards. I can understand that. And while I could listen with all my heart and soul, to share I could only pretend. My son soon realized this, though I hid it from him as much as I could.

  ‘Yet I tried – believe me, Mr Forbes, I honestly tried – to educate, to force myself into his way of thinking. You’d be vastly amused to hear how much poetry I have read solely with that end in view, and almost always with complete unsuccess.’

  A sudden unbosoming smile swept over her face, like a burst of sunshine over corn-shocks at harvest-tide. ‘If I go on like this,’ she broke off, ‘you will be suspecting that I think it is my confessions you are after!’

  Ronnie greeted this sally as amply as he knew how, inwardly speculating the while how it came about that with so easy and bountiful a field to glean Cyril Charlton had carried off so mingy a sheaf. Why, even a raw reporter …! But Mrs Cotton was hastening on.

  ‘Egotist or not,’ she was saying, ‘I toiled on at my task, and at least became a little more capable of realizing the force and the strain of my son’s secret idolatry. There was only one thing in the world for him – poetry. At first I believe he hadn’t the faintest desire or intention to share this craving with any other human being except his father. Afterwards, I happened to be there, and – there wasn’t anybody else. And though I had fallen far short of any true appreciation, I had become aware of two things: first, that there is such a thing as poetry, and next, that I had a pretty shrewd notion of what poetry isn’t.

  ‘Poetry, Mr Forbes, as I have tried to understand it,’ – she waved her hand towards the window – ‘is all there, just waiting for us. But it won’t necessarily show itself at call or even at need. Un paysage est un état de l’âme; and so of poetry. One must – am I right? – have the mind, the sense, the spirit within – to invoke it. That I realize. It is a way of looking at things, a way of feeling about them, almost of being them – a way of living. And it is, I suppose – you will let me go groping on – as inseparable, if you have that particular sense and insight – as inseparable, I say, from the world at large and everything in it as its scent is from a flower. And no more inseparable either, for just as you can extract its scent from a flower and shut it up in a bottle, so you can extract the poetry from the life around and within you and put it into words and them into a book. Is that so? Am I even in the right direction?’ She stooped towards her silent visitor as if her very life might depend upon his answer – an answer that nonetheless failed to come. ‘Well, I am being dreadfully clumsy, dreadfully commonplace. But I believe all that as surely, though maybe as gropingly, as a blind man believes that there is such a thing as light.

  ‘Yet the thing itself is hidden from me, shut out from me. Try as I may, I cannot grasp or share it. On the one side my son, almost coldly conscious, I might say, of these volcanic feelings, pursuing this strange mystery, this mirage, eating his heart out, never satisfied, ready to sacrifice anything, everything, for its sake; and on the other, myself – stuttering and pretending, but so far as heart and soul are concerned, absolutely as dumb and insensitive as a fish.

  ‘In spite of this, he was always generosity itself to me, though I knew
that if the worst ever came to the worst even a mother would have to be sacrificed on that altar. But at last, as you know, his poems were published. Published.’

  The rather flat yet mobile face had cleared at the word as if, for the moment at least, these riddles and perplexities were over, as if she had steered clear of the reefs. ‘You will be amused to hear that I myself arranged all that: the printing, the paper, the binding – his final choice, of course. I saw the publisher, a Mr Crown, in London, again and again, and settled everything – expenses, advertising, commission, everything. He, too, in spite of his dingy little office and a very extraordinary secretary, seemed to be a most enthusiastic admirer of poetry, though, as I have since discovered – and here Mr Charlton could give me surprisingly little information – I was treated on severely business-like principles. Indeed between ourselves, Mr Forbes, I soon began to suspect not merely this gentleman’s enthusiasm but, well, his honesty also. So far eventually as our little book was concerned it might just as well, on his side, have been soap or sugar!

  ‘The critics, on the other hand – though I was unable to follow all that they said, which was not, of course, at great length – were exceedingly kind. I don’t mean that they were more than just – how could I? They were exceedingly kind. Some thirty copies of the book, I was given to understand, were sent to the newspapers, and about eight were sold. But apart from the bills I paid I have never had any particulars. For the time being my son found a good deal of happiness in his venture. And then I think the merely practical side of it began to bother him a little. He fancied that we, that I, had been dreadfully cheated. I had gone off to this Mr Crown, I should have mentioned, without my son’s knowledge. But it wasn’t so much the money involved – though I happened to learn afterwards he did not pay fees for the reviews – it was – well, I suppose, the humiliation. My son was grieved and ashamed at what such things come to. He had been kept by his father, for his own sake perhaps, too long out of the world to realize its sense of proportion. Nevertheless, he went on writing. But with more and more difficulty. A dreadful despair seemed to have come over him. He shunned everyone. He had been – mortally – wounded. But I, even then, was powerless to help him. We know so little of what is passing in any other mind – even those nearest to us. And then – at last … Well, there is no need to go into that.’

  She had paused again, and the pair of them, so far as their eyes were concerned, seemed to be like two funereal birds hovering over some morsel which neither of them had much appetite for – though it was part of God’s plenty – and which it was hardly in the nature of things that they should be able to share. Nevertheless Ronnie was conscious rather of a void than of any very definite dainty, and he could only blink.

  But the pause had come at an opportune moment. So hot and airless was the low-pitched room in which they sat, so heavy the odour of the flowers around them, that but a few instants before, though his gaze had remained fixed on Mrs Cotton’s face, his glazing orbs from sheer sleepiness had actually rocked in his head. Now he was wide awake again; and he had need to be, for Mrs Cotton was hastening on.

  ‘To our second venture, as you may be aware, Mr Forbes, the critics were less kind. They, too, couldn’t fully understand what my son was after, though better than I could. Could you?’

  At this her visitor’s round and somewhat fresh-coloured face perceptibly paled. Yet again the trumpet had sounded. For a breath he hesitated, and then bolted the lump that had come into his throat. ‘I don’t know the poems well enough to say,’ he said.

  Mrs Cotton turned away. ‘Well, I am grateful to you for that,’ was her unexpected retort. But her voice had trailed off a little as if from some inward rather than from any mere physical fatigue.

  ‘That being so, you will the more readily realize, then,’ she continued, ‘that when, after the publication of my son’s second book – which was, as a matter of fact, destined to be his last – it became clear to me that even those who are supposed to understand such things were unable to follow him, to grasp his meaning, to share even his intention – when I saw that so far he had absolutely failed, it was a very bitter grief to me. Not for my own sake, though what mother is not practically ambitious for her children? – but for his. I had realized you see – and it is here that I hope you will be most patient with me and will forgive me if I repeat myself – I had realized that to some minds and to some spirits poetry is what religion is to others – the most precious, the most certain, the most wanted thing life has to give. And now that he had fallen silent I could at least realize too if only in part the affliction it meant to him. Not that, because he was silent, the beauty and meaning – the divination – of life were gone too. Not that; surely not that! That would be such a lie as no Cyril Charlton even is capable of. It was still there – within him; between himself and his Maker.

  ‘I once came across somewhere a passage in a book – I can’t remember its title or even its author, but being eager and interested as I was then, it stamped itself on my memory: “He that has never seen this beauty must hunger for it as for all his welfare, he that has known it must love and reverence it as the very beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness.” Well, surely, even if it be averred that these early hopes and desires were nothing but a fool’s paradise – and that I refuse to believe; and even though you may regret the folly, still you cannot deny that to my son they were a paradise? No more then would I deny the hope of its continuance, though the gates should be shut for ever that gave others a glimpse of it.’ She paused, her small square hands clenched in her lap.

  ‘I have finished, Mr Forbes. As you see, I live here a quiet and retired life. I believe that no good thing in this world – since it is a world founded on divine reason – can be eventually wasted. I believe therefore that whatever there is of this infinite grace in my son’s poems will find in time its own haven, even though they may be completely forgotten here on earth. Meanwhile I keep my lesson. Cyril Charlton, and much else that I won’t burden you with, taught me at any rate once and for all that there is a danger worse than death to this “very beauty”, and that it comes, not from the enemies, but from these so-called “lovers” of poetry – these parasites – their jealousies, their quarrels, their pretences, their petty curiosity, their suffocating silliness. I will have none of it. I am determined – determined that this precious “world-at-large” – your own words – shall leave my son and all he loved and the dreams from which there is now no waking, at peace. His memory, himself, safe here with me; to the end.’

  She had risen from her chair as she finished speaking. With hands clutched on her bodice, her small pupils glinting like semi-precious stones, she stood over poor Ronnie, and dared him to do his worst. There were tears in the eyes now challenging him, tears, he realized, not of weakness but of strength, and squeezed out of a spirit, stable as adamant, which would not swerve by an inch if the need came to stride off exulting to the stake.

  And as, not apparently in any desire for air, and certainly not for retreat, but merely to conceal her feelings – and maybe from herself – Mrs Cotton turned her back on her visitor and marched over to the French windows, Ronnie stirred awkwardly in his chair. The attitude in which he had been listening to this prolonged declamation had become a little strained. He stirred – as if he were ‘coming to’. And, ‘what the devil,’ he was thinking ruefully, if a little vacantly, ‘what the devil had he or his young American friend to do with any “stake”!’

  The windows had been flung open to their fullest gape. The tepid April air of the garden thinned in on the boxed-up atmosphere. It pierced with its sweet earthy freshness the pent-in odours of the forced flowers. Ronnie breathed and breathed again. The drowsy cadences of a blackbird from some shrubbery out of view fell on his ear like waterdrops into the basin of a fountain. And then suddenly from quite near at hand resounded the sudden shrill battle-cry – incredibly defiant, even formidable, for a creature so minute – of a wren.

  Mrs Co
tton had paused, her hand on the window-frame, only, it seemed, to regain her self-possession. She turned at last, and with a gesture waved as it were all these last few confidences between them aside.

  ‘So you see, Mr Forbes,’ she said, ‘now that I have said what I have said, and it has not been an easy task, I must resign the rest to you. You will forget any resentment I may have shown. But as I look back on Mr Charlton I find it difficult to be fair to him. I believed at the time that he at least meant well, that he had my son’s reputation at heart only and solely because he himself really cared for poetry, whereas I … What else can I do then but commit myself entirely into your hands? You have come this long distance. You are bound to consider your friend’s interests. I feel then I must leave you absolutely at liberty to use your own judgment as to what shall be proclaimed on the housetops and what not. You have not supposed, at least, that I want what my son has done to be forgotten. Though its innermost secrets may be hidden from me, I can at least be aware that to other minds they may be very precious.’ Her arms fell loosely to her sides. Even in youth her short, rather dumpy figure could never have been of any particular feminine grace; yet Ronnie was fated to remember that gesture. It had reminded him, absurdly enough, not of Velasquez’s Surrender, but of a ballet dancer by Degas.

  ‘And now’ – she was almost timidly inviting him – ‘I hope you will stay and take tea with us – my daughter-in-law will join us presently.’

  Ronnie dutifully murmured a word or two about trains, but she tossed them aside. ‘You must let it be part of our compact,’ she said, eying him almost archly but with an ironic intentness. ‘Meanwhile I must leave you for a moment.’

  She paused at the door at which Ronnie had entered. ‘The picture immediately behind you,’ she said, ‘is a portrait of James when he was a child of seven. It was painted by an artist – an R.A. – who is now, I believe, out of fashion. But he was not so then. The old gentleman with the pug-dog in his lap next to it (a really good picture, I have been told), is my son’s great grandfather – on my husband’s side. And in that album on the whatnot you will find photographs and some pieces of manuscript. Please look at anything that may interest you.’