Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  There was a peculiar grace in his movements, too, such as any wild but timid creature shows even when kept in a cage, and an almost absurd fastidiousness was manifest in his clothes. And though – in part, possibly, because this hideous green shade of his had always shielded his face from the furies of a London sun – his features were unusually pale, there was nothing positively effeminate in his looks. Wild things, after all, however timid, are not necessarily of the weaker sex.

  Residents in Galloway Crescent were seldom visible at their windows. To many of them, nonetheless, Cecil must long since have become a familiar figure since the pavement between their iron balconies and their basements was part of his daily constitutional. Where old Professor Smith lived indeed, at No.24 – an old gentleman so profoundly interested in Persian literature that he had no need of ‘the time’ – the neat parlour-maid sometimes actually set her pantry clock by this young man. Busy at her dusting, her dark eye would glance down from the professor’s first-floor drawing-room – to which she was all but the sole visitor – and would descry Cecil gently forging his way along with a motion like that of a yacht on a halcyon sea.

  ‘Why, there’s that young Mr Jennings!’ she would exclaim to herself, with a thrill in her mind, and would at once run off downstairs to look at the clock to see if its hands – as they usually did – actually pointed to ten minutes past eleven.

  On this particular morning, however, Cecil was at least a quarter of an hour before his time; and to judge from his progress, a stiffer breeze than usual was cat’s-pawing his sea. On approaching the crescent’s westerly horn, however, his footsteps began to lag. And now he seemed to be taking the liveliest possible interest in the outskirts of the scene which his shade and his affliction enabled him to command.

  His slightly protruding dark-blue eyes were fixed on the pavement as if in eager search of something. They were. What indeed for days past his mind had been positively bent on was the hope of discovering – not its fellow – but the owner of the grey suède glove that now lay safely tucked away in the side pocket of his jacket. That hope was rapidly waning – to leave him not only restless but forlorn. This morning he was little more than pursuing its shadow, as one may pursue the vanishing memories of a happy dream.

  In a monotonous life even the smallest excitement seems to have dropped clean out of the blue. And since Cecil’s day-by-day had for years been as regular and punctual as Professor Smith’s parlour-maid’s pantry clock, to want anything badly was a novel and exciting experience. He was still in his early twenties, and in part because of his affliction, in part because of a natural shyness, he was still under the unrelaxing care of a kind of step-grandmother, Mrs le Mercier – a lady of ample means if not always of entirely transparent ends.

  Cecil also had money of his own. Comfort lapped him in; every wish – within reason – could be gratified. There was only this one comparatively slight ocular disability. He might have been a cripple, or an imbecile, or a man of genius, or gravel-blind; and even then not always unhappy. But nothing so tragic as that. He was merely incapable of looking up. From his earliest infancy this curious and baffling derangement of his eyes had kept whatever attention he had to give fixed almost exclusively on the ground. By thrusting back his head a little he could, it is true, increase his optical range. But any effort of this kind was severe, and was apt to cause him excruciating pain. And Mrs le Mercier – ‘Grummumma’, as he called her – steadily set her face against these experiments. She counselled patience and moderation – to any extreme.

  ‘I cannot bear the distress of it,’ she would cry, when Cecil falteringly groped upwards with his head. And though, naturally, she had spent a good deal of money to get expert advice, she had never given up hope that time which heals all things might alleviate this, and had never been in favour of drastic measures. She hated the notion of plaguing the poor dear boy, and even of reminding him more often than was necessary to his well-being that he was different from other young men.

  ‘After all,’ she would sometimes confide in her friends, ‘so long as dear Cecil is all right in himself, that is all that really matters. There is nothing, thank God, abnormal in any way, and fine frenzies, I am thankful to say, are not Cecil’s forte. That is my conviction. So long as he is all right in himself, we must just make the best we can of his little handicap.’ Still, even Grummumma occasionally had her doubts, and could be peevish when incommoded.

  Standing in his shade in the middle of the luxurious, almost lush, French carpet laid all over Mrs le Mercier’s drawing-room, and soundlessly rotating on his heels, Cecil could see nothing beyond a circle of a circumference of about nine or ten feet. By mounting up on to a chair he could of course extend his survey. Still, all human venture is only human venture. And at no time in his life had Cecil ever been tempted to become an explorer or a pioneer. He was as normal in that respect as most people. And his grandmother, in the kindness of the heart that lay somewhere within her ample bosom, had, if anything, tended to restrict his range. Whims of a contrary kind she would greet with indulgent if not copious amusement. And as time went on – though it seemed powerless to add anything more suggestive of age than ‘presence’ to her general effect – that amusement grew ever more pronounced.

  Inspired one April morning in his seventeenth year by a bright idea, Cecil had been discovered kneeling, hairbrush in hand, busily knocking into his bedroom wall – a foot or so above the wainscot – a tintack or two. Unframed photographs of the ‘old masters’ lay scattered on the floor around him.

  ‘You know how I enjoy looking at them, as much as I can look at them,’ he had explained to Grummumma, archly surveying him from the doorway. ‘I wanted just to see if – well, you see, at this height —’

  ‘And Grummumma doesn’t blame her dear boy,’ she had replied in that deep, rich voice of hers. ‘It’s the happiest of thoughts! Nonetheless, I am perfectly certain, Cecil, you didn’t want anyone – one of the maids, say – who happened to be passing your door to die of laughing. You can’t imagine how absurd the effect is – even to me. No, Cecil, we don’t want that.’ And Cecil had at once concurred.

  It may or may not be true that children in general enjoy a far more comprehensive view of life than their elders are apt to surmise. It was true anyhow of Cecil: and this in spite of his poor eyes. His mother, indeed, in his quite early days, had realized this, and had always made a point of engaging tall, strapping nursemaids, to the end that the little man, while at least she had any say in the matter, should see as much of the world as possible.

  Fortunately, too, in this respect she had not died until fully six months after he had been breeched, when to be carried about at all, even by the Queen of Brobdingnag herself, would have been a little humiliating. He had once enjoyed ‘the larger view’; that was the point.

  On the other hand, all children, however freely they may twist their big heads on their small bodies, are accustomed to being close to the ground, which may in part account for the fact that as they grow older they are apt to have a rather narrow outlook. Cecil, having as an infant spent most of his waking hours in high chairs and in the arms of these nursery grenadiers, became suddenly shorter, so to speak, as soon as his mother died; and Grummumma was not one to gainsay the obvious.

  But then again, mere custom, while it may blunt and dull the mind, can also bless it with almost incredible funds of patience and endurance. And of an uncomplaining household – consisting of himself, Mrs le Mercier, an occasional grandniece, three servants, a gardener, his boy, and a kind of crippled old pensioner who did the boots and other odd and dirty jobs – Cecil was the most uncomplaining member. It was to outward appearance a singularly placid household. The servants kept their audibility to their own quarters; Eirene, Grummumma’s grandniece, was unusually discreet for a young woman of her age; Cecil was no conversationalist; and Mrs le Mercier, though she had a temper, very rarely showed or lost it. Concealed and kept, it was, if anything, more intimidating. Even at its ex
treme, it dressed itself up in the mantle of a mute, peculiar, ferocious scorn.

  Any kind of incompetence in any home cannot but be a burden, however philosophically that burden may be borne. The moment it threatened to become unbearable in hers, Grummumma became a dowager Mrs Christian, while remaining Mrs Worldly-Wisewoman in her methods of correcting it. She could be liberal, even magnanimous to anyone really dependent on her, and she never humiliated the humble. Her husband, after a long tedious illness, had, as it were, suddenly dropped out of her life. This was years ago. She thought of him nonetheless kindly and even sentimentally, whenever she did think of him, because it had been a release to them both.

  She had never had any children, and every scrap of maternal instinct she possessed was squandered on Cecil. He was hers ‘for keeps’. ‘He is “my young man”,’ she had more than once fondly sighed of him over her tea-table. ‘If anything happened to him …’ A momentary frumpishness of utter dejection would settle over her copious figure; one plump ringed hand resting on the Indian tea-tray beside her while she followed up the sentence in the silence of her mind.

  All this was nonetheless a little curious, for Mrs le Mercier couldn’t endure in any human being the slightest deviation from the normal. At sight of a humpback her eyes rolled in her head. She could be charitable – but only from a distance. As a girl she had been made to read the life of St Francis. It had disgusted her. This experience – and similar compulsions – had tainted for her the very sight of a serious book. Even the marks in a strange face of poverty or sickness filled her with dismay – ‘froze her up’.

  ‘I know it, my dear,’ she had once confided in a friend. ‘I am at the mercy of horrors.’ And there came with the words such a look of helplessness into her bold and formidable face that even cruelty itself would have hesitated to set to work on such a victim.

  It may have been in order to spare her own feelings, then, that though she had never desisted in her efforts to better poor Cecil’s eyes, she had steadily opposed anything in the nature of an operation. Physicians and specialists from every country in Europe had been consulted, turn and turn about, and had expressed their views at large when out of hearing of their subject. For Cecil, this ordeal had almost become a habit. He knew how to avoid being hurt, became an expert in specialists’ little ways, and usually feigned to be much more of a muff even than he looked. And when the specialist was gone, he would settle his silk shade over his eyes and just simply become himself again, whatever that might mean.

  ‘We cannot be downcast,’ Grummumma would sometimes declare in astonishing contradiction of her habits, ‘we cannot be downcast, my dear boy, provided we know the worst. Face that, and all is well. Not, of course, that all these clever men intend to be optimistic. It’s just false hopes that are the bane of most people. The poor hope to be rich, the afflicted hope to be whole, little realizing how much happier they would be if they remained contented with things as they are, and expected them so to stay. After all, Cecil, the ways of Providence are inscrutable.’

  So Cecil had continued not to look up. On the other hand, there is a metaphorical use of the phrase, and Cecil had been reminded of it at rather frequent intervals. Here Grummumma and he indeed completely parted company. Particularly when Canon Bagshot came not merely to lunch but to ‘help’. When Cecil was a little boy, the canon used to take him – used indeed to wedge him – between angular knees and talk to him. Being spare, dark, and tall, Canon Bagshot looked a more ascetic man even than he actually was. He had done excellent, if rather active, work in the parish and was one of the few human beings whose company Mrs le Mercier could enjoy without any symptom on his part of a polite subservience; and no local scheme of betterment was complete without him. Among these schemes, Canon Bagshot had somehow got imbedded in his mind the notion that Cecil might be cured of his physical difficulty if in spirit, so to speak, he could he persuaded or induced or compelled to ‘look up’.

  One particular catechism of this kind remained vividly in Cecil’s memory, and Grummumma had been present at it, sitting with her back to the window, and drinking it all in. There was a particular large rose of many graduated reds in the beautiful carpet upon which he remembered he had then been standing. Two large bony hands had been holding his elbows, but only the extreme edges of the canon’s dark, wide, dinted chin were visible as it gently wagged up and down.

  ‘You know well, my dear boy,’ the voice had assured him, ‘how much we all have your happiness at heart. And if we urge you to things even a little painful in themselves, it is only for your good. And now I am told you refuse to speak sometimes when you are spoken to. Why is that?’

  At the moment Cecil had no wish to refuse to speak, but his mouth was dry, he felt extremely uncomfortable, and what he most wanted to do was to look up into Canon Bagshot’s face – though only to see if it resembled what was suggested by the tones of his voice. He meant to explain too that it was useless to ask him the same question again and again when he had already answered it. Instead of this, he at last managed to mutter: ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘But then, you see, my dear boy,’ Canon Bagshot had replied firmly, ‘it’s just those don’t wants that harass and impede us in life’s pilgrimage. It is not what we want or don’t want to do, but what we ought to do that matters. Your dear grandmamma wishes only for your good. “Ah,” you may say, “I can’t be like other boys.” And that, of course, in its degree is perfectly true. God’s will be done. But it doesn’t mean that in many other things you cannot be better than other boys, setting them an example which should shame them, knowing what advantages they have, while at the same time you yourself should realize the many, many advantages denied to them which have not been denied to you. Do you follow me?’

  The canon’s voice, its mere accents, somehow reminded Cecil of an illustration in one of his story books – the picture of an Alpine guide, brass horn to lip, just vanishing round an incredibly precipitous bluff of snow and rock. It invited one on.

  Cecil indeed had in actual fact been a long way in front throughout this speech. He now had to hasten back in order to nod and shake his head. This contradictory gesture was a little instinctive device of his own. If he had been able to raise his eyes, he might, with the same end in view, have opened them wider, then shut them.

  ‘Precisely!’ cried the canon. ‘And examples are better than precepts. Are they not? You would hardly believe it, perhaps, but there is a poor old woman living in Fish Street, not a mile from here, who is compelled to lie on her back day in, day out, in one dingy little room into which I should hesitate to take a dog. She knows absolutely nothing of the gentle circumstances that surround you. Only one dingy old blanket to cover her; only one window, cracked and grimed, to look out of all day long. And I ask you, is she unhappy?’

  ‘She must be very stupid if she is not,’ had been Cecil’s first thought. What he said was: ‘I hate old women in Fish Street.’

  ‘You will please, Cecil,’ came a voice from Grummumma’s bow-window, ‘you will please, when you are addressing Canon Bagshot, leave off these sullen manners. Those who live with you may be accustomed to them; visitors are not. Besides, it is very irreverent.’

  ‘Well, my dear boy,’ continued the canon magnanimously, ‘whatever you may think, you are mistaken. That poor, miserable old woman is as happy as the days are long.’ The last part of the remark on this bleared winter afternoon was perhaps less appropriate than it seemed on the surface. But Cecil made no comment.

  ‘Now to have to use physical persuasion in your case,’ the canon continued, ‘is the last thing anyone could wish. All that I want you to remember is this: Humility, Trust, Gratitude. Say these words over to yourself night and morning. Say them now. No,’ the canon rapidly added, remembering similar adjurations in the past, ‘say them over when you are alone. For it is not, dear boy, as if we could plead ignorance. We know our duty. It is in black and white. “I must order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.” What do
es that mean? Surely, no scowling looks, no dumb-doggedness. Friends are constantly praying for you; sympathy is being poured out for your affliction. But though it is your lot in life to be compelled to be unable to face the world boldly, as Christian faced Apollyon, in spirit you can, like all of us, at least learn to look up. And I, as one of the humblest of spiritual pastors and masters, if you remain recalcitrant, must find some means of insisting upon your making the attempt. No sullenness, now, no dark clouds! What were our Gentle Three? – Humility, Trust, Gratitude.’

  How odd a paradox. It was this Gentle Three that poor Cecil in later life had most to contend against; if, at least, there was to be any hope of his becoming the Happy Warrior.

  But these were far-away days. Sunday by Sunday Cecil had continued to sit beside Mrs le Mercier in her pew at St Peter’s and St Paul’s. But the canon’s sermons on these occasions were of a more general application. And since they differed as little in form as they did in matter and Cecil knew their trend by heart, much of this edifying half-hour was spent in daydreaming. Here he had an advantage over his neighbours. For not only were the mean decorations of the Corinthian pillar and of the pitch-pine roof over his head, and the utterly dehumanized saints depicted in the stained-glass chancel windows – mustard green, blue, and crushed strawberry – out of his range, but no one could judge from his downcast eyes on what his attention was fixed.

  But on the whole his relations with Grummumma were friendly enough, and, when visitors were present, even cordial. Then, indeed, if only in a negative sort of way, he might be said to look up to her, though it was difficult to tell exactly to what extent. And partly because he could not help himself and partly because of a natural indolence, he had just gone his own way – the way within, that is – without saying very much about it and without deliberately setting his will against hers.