Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Cecil, however, could hardly be said to be thinking of this auld lang syne as he gently pushed on round the crescent this particular sunny morning, one hand clasping the derelict glove in his jacket pocket. Only the faintest nebulous incubus of it hung in his mind. Meanwhile his eyes wandered restlessly and heedlessly over the ground at his feet. He had long been an expert in his own orbit. Quite apart from such manageable refuse as cigar and cigarette ends, dead matches, hairpins, footprints, pavement weeds, moss, the laying of asphalt, puddles, mud, dogs, cats, pebbles, straw, and so on, not to mention the lovely way of the wind in withered leaves or drifting snow – concerning which he was probably the only expert for miles around, he was also a connoisseur of horses’ hoofs, boots and shoes, socks and laces, of the nether portion of trouser-legs, and of feminine skirts, shoes, and ankles. He was an expert, that is, without in the least being aware of it.

  He had long enjoyed the habit, too, of steadily scrutinizing what happened to interest him indoors as well as out. Reading desperately tired his eyes, and so, even apart from the books his Grummumma kept out of his way, his literary range was decidedly narrow. But while he looked and read, he usually thought. He was indeed a master of his own exceedingly small fraction of the complete human range of consciousness – a range fairly considerable in itself and one which, of course, if only in the world of matter, is being steadily amplified.

  But this fine morning he was anxious, uneasy, and sick at heart. His eyes wandered vacantly, his attention was elsewhere: simply because his one and only desire was to return the rather dingy glove in his pocket to its owner. He just wanted to say: ‘You will forgive me for intruding, but I picked this up, you see. And you may have missed it perhaps.’

  It was never very easy to raise his hat when his Grummumma whispered: ‘Ssh, Cecil, there’s Mrs Shrub, or Lady Linsey, or Miss Bolsover,’ mainly because he got so nervous and usually hit with his knuckles the shade over his eyes before his fingers reached the brim above.

  But this time he was going to do it very carefully, and then take his leave. It seemed to him a small glove compared with Eirene’s, with Mrs le Mercier’s, or even with that of their parlour-maid, Janet, which he had seen by accident hanging beside her skirt (its hand within it), at the area gate but a few weeks ago, after one of her ‘afternoons out’.

  This glove was scented, too, though not quite so delicately as would seem to make it impossible for Grummumma to detect it even though it lay in his pocket. Grummumma’s gloves were also scented, but rather with herself than with anything else. He had deduced, too, that this specimen of a glove cannot have been an expensive one. Yet the fact that it had a tiny hole in its first finger only made him the more anxious to return it to its owner. But – his heart had come into his mouth once more – how on earth was he to recognize her unless she happened to be wearing the same blue serge skirt, and the same stockings and shoes as when she had come his way and had gone?

  Never had there been such a fool as he was – he knew that well enough. But to be a fool in public is one thing, to be a fool in one’s own private soul is another. And that was what he was being now. He was being timid and ashamed simply because there was the faintest possibility that Grummumma might herself be abroad that morning in her soft glacé kid shoes, or that Canon Bagshot might come treading along in his stout parochials, or spry, odious, mincing Miss Bolsover, with her ringing voice and old-fashioned springsiders. All three of them would realize at once that he was not merely enjoying his morning walk, but hanging about, loafing. They would watch him; their gaze would bore into his back; and by that time it might be – well, too late. That the sun was scorchingly hot and the pavement a continuous glare, with its sharp-cut shadows here and there and its steady, pungent, broiling odour, was, however, a joy rather than a martyrdom.

  Cecil had by this time not only turned the corner of the crescent but was approaching the first of a row of shops. Their window-blinds hung dazzling in the sunshine, casting delightful shadows. A medley of noises zigzagged across the air. The whole vista of High Street, he knew, was steadily effervescing with traffic of matutinal gaiety and business. It was odd how one’s mind roved to and fro from point to point in memory without once realizing its direction, or what had intervened. He had suddenly become a little boy again, his right hand tenaciously clutching the iron handle of a perambulator, which a plump young nursemaid, named Annie, in a stiff print gown, was pushing in front of her. At the same moment a grocer’s assistant had come back to mind, a young man with a voice almost as rich in flavours as the inside of the shop in which he served. On the morning in memory he had slipped out of the shop to talk to Annie. And though Cecil could not recall any of the pleasantries they had actually exchanged, he could remember how double-voiced the young man with the frayed white apron and corrugated button-boots had seemed to be – just as if what he was saying had two meanings, one for Annie and one for himself.

  And Annie had giggled on, while her cotton-gloved hand stroked gently the iron handle of the perambulator above Cecil’s dumpy thumb. He hadn’t liked the young man, and had even attempted to lift his young eyes just to give him a stare, to show it. The pain had dreadfully frightened him. And he was glad Annie had afterwards married a strange postman who had come to help in the district during the Valentine season.

  This romantic little recollection for some reason made him still more ill at ease, and once again he reassured himself by clutching at the glove in his pocket. He hated the shops in this busier time of the day. He hated all crowds, ‘gatherings’, congregations. He could tell by the legs and feet of the people thronging the street and its shop windows that from their upper parts they were also curiously examining this green-shaded stranger in their midst.

  ‘What the devil!’ he would now and then quietly mutter to himself. And then perhaps: ‘Oh, mind your eye!’ These hardly refined exclamations, picked up he knew not whence, were part of the life Grummumma knew nothing about. And still he held on, with that gentle antenna-like movement of his ivory-headed cane, and with rapid searching glances from under his shade at every human extremity that came into view.

  This was his sixth similar excursion, and today he pushed on still farther – three more shops: an ironmonger’s, with lawn mowers, syringes, pruning-knives, and slug-traps in the low window, all well within view; a tobacconist’s – but Cecil had not been taught to smoke – and a tailor’s and outfitter’s.

  Here for a moment he came to a pause. For a moment even his mission edged a little out of his mind. He adored clothes. Apart from his little collection of unframed prints and engravings and postage stamps, and apart of course from the plate on Sundays, they were all but his only means of being extravagant. In blind furious moments he had, it is true, more than once given every penny he had in his pocket to some dog-guarded ‘blind man’, or paralytic, or forlorn-looking shrew selling matches in the street. This was not exactly charity, even though his heart seemed to gulp in his body at sight of them. It was a hostage to fortune, a clumsy attempt to call quits, perhaps.

  For in general, like Grummumma, Cecil detested beggars, and edged away from anything that could be described as ghastly, horrible, or even unpleasant. He detested rags, dirt, and neglect; even the brazen spectacle of ‘potatoes’ in stockings or of leaking welts failed to amuse him. His shoes, his suits, his own gloves and hats and other adornments were made to measure. He enjoyed considering himself a fop; his little, innocent airs and graces were a sort of hobby. The ‘man’ would call at the house, and Mrs le Mercier, anxious to indulge any little harmless whim, would leave them to themselves. In all that concerns clothes and kindred matters, indeed, Cecil was at least as much of an expert as was Thomas Carlyle; and this morning he edged slowly along the display in the window, digesting for future use the exclusive shapes and tints and fabrics displayed on the other side of its plate glass.

  Then suddenly at whisper of a silken frou-frou behind him, a flush of shame mounted into his pale cheek, and he turned
about and retraced his footsteps. And Providence was watching over him. For he had trailed on not more than a dozen paces or so when, having arrived at the two private doors separating tobacconist’s from ironmonger’s, his anxious glance alighted on the long expected. And every drop of blood in him stood still.

  The owner of this particular pair of shoes must herself have reached the tobacconist’s while he had been engaged at the outfitter’s. And, though the indiscriminate noises of the street had suddenly mounted up into a prolonged roar, and then had ceased, and though every fibre of Cecil’s body seemed to be at an affrighting stretch, he knew as well as if an angel had whispered it into his ear, that she – the longed-for stranger – was now actually surveying the peculiar creature he appeared to be.

  In a strange, dizzy eternity, every forecast of this meeting, turned over and over in his mind night after night of late before he had fallen asleep, fled on the four shining winds of heaven. It was as if he had come to the very end of a long straight road – and then, nothing.

  He had forgotten Grummumma, Canon Bagshot, Miss Bolsover, Mrs Grundy, all the conventions and his manners; he had forgotten himself, his shade, the glove, the universe. There was nothing anywhere but just this mute unknown figure, of whose slim person in its black-braided blue serge skirt less than one-third was visible to him. How odd that even in a world renowned for its oddities just a scarcely perceptible flaw in the sewing of a toe-cap would alone have been enough to distinguish those shoes from every other ‘foot-wear’ in man’s five continents!

  Perceptible – no, that was not the real mystery. The shoes, the skirt, were all he could see; and yet it seemed the presence of this unknown girl, the very being of her, flooded his senses, his mind, and – one might almost add – his soul. There was not even the perfume of the glove to help him. Possibly that slim malacca cane of his had now become in sober truth one of a pair of human antennae. What he had meant to say, what he had heard himself saying again and again – not a single syllable of it recurred to his mind. His chin had lifted itself by a fraction of an inch. He could scarcely breathe, and his heart, as though it were a hare on a dewy hill-side when distant hounds are hallooing, seemed to be sitting perfectly still in its ribbed cage.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he heard a voice utterly unfamiliar and yet his own, pleading, ‘please forgive me. I have been looking for you for days and days and days. This is your glove.’ He was holding it out, as if, poor young man, it was the very secret of his life.

  At this the feet beneath his gaze seemed to have planted themselves a little more firmly in their shoes. There was an enormous pause, while instinctively the young woman hesitated to thrust out her gloved right hand or her bare left, till this moment concealed in her skirt. As a matter of fact, it was the bare left hand that came into Cecil’s view. And at first glimpse of it – though Cecil was unconscious of the cause for at least half an hour afterwards – a frigid and nauseating misgiving and disappointment had swept over him.

  ‘And here,’ said the voice, ‘here’s the very hand it belongs to. Thank you ever so much.’

  Perhaps because their fellow-servants, his eyes, were unable to be of as much service as they might have been, Cecil’s ears were acuter than most. Before that voice’s sound had come to an end, he had half-consciously examined and dissected its every minutest cadence and nuance, just as a connoisseur may sit down to the critical enjoyment, say, of a fugue by Bach, or a melody of Handel’s. It rang within him – it very quietly rang within him – and he never doubted in the least that he could read not only much of its owner, but even of its owner’s past in its inflexions. How strange; for never in the world was there such a benighted ignoramus, such a poor, abandoned creature on a remote atoll, as he.

  ‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘that’s it right enough. I should know it, if by nothing else, by the hole in the first finger. I hate mending, and I haven’t much time. But how you came to know it was mine, and why you should have taken so much trouble about it simply beats me. It simply beats me, I confess.’

  Every vestige of self-confidence had by this time evaporated in Cecil’s mind. Yet – and how he managed it he could not conceive – the next remark he heard himself making appalled him by its boldness: ‘I want, if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘to keep it. Or will you please let me give it you another time?’

  He could not see the longish nose and the dark eyes beneath the delicate curved dark eyebrows of the face now confronting him beneath its cheap straw hat. Its whole attention was steadily, the least bit suspiciously, and yet with immeasurable candour, fixed on his mouth. ‘It isn’t of much value,’ said the voice, but without the faintest trace of mockery in it.

  ‘No, but you see,’ blurted Cecil anxiously, ‘I have kept it so many days now, and should miss it … I haven’t very much to do, you see. And, of course, not many friends.’

  This was well on the right side of exaggeration, since in sober fact and in any real meaning of the word, he hadn’t any friends at all. For though his rather remote cousin Eirene seemed to be almost more often in the house than not, and was occasionally accompanied by familiars of her own of both sexes, Cecil could never be perfectly at his ease with her, let alone with them. Nor could he ever be quite sure why she was so persistently sympathetic. He hated that even more than he deplored her silly French shoes and the colours and patterns she chose for her clothes. As for her friends, they never took any notice of him, no more at least than if he were a rather unusual chair, a dumb animal, or a pet canary that spent its existence pecking at a blunt-headed yellow spray of groundsel and enjoying an unlimited supply of lump sugar.

  ‘Well,’ responded the clear, crisp voice, ‘even if you haven’t, you don’t seem to mind very much.’

  ‘I mind enormously,’ cried the young man, so loudly that he positively alarmed a little old gentleman with a purplish face and pale blue eyes who happened to be passing at the moment, and who whipped round on him like a startled bird.

  ‘Then why don’t you make some?’ inquired the voice.

  ‘I meant not friends – the glove,’ blurted Cecil desperately. ‘I mean, I want to keep it. May I give it you next time? Tomorrow?’

  ‘I am not so sure as I can get out,’ replied the stranger.

  ‘Well, if you please could and would,’ he said, ‘I shall be waiting here at this time. I shall be waiting here until —’

  ‘Until?’ echoed the other.

  ‘Why, until,’ he trailed on, ‘there is no hope at all of your ever coming again.’

  Once more there came a pause. The eyes regarding him had fallen, and were now overwhelmed, though evidently not for the first time, by a cloud of doubt and perplexity.

  ‘Well, I really don’t know that I ought to be seeing you again, I really don’t —’ the stranger’s voice was repeating, as if she were speaking to herself. ‘We don’t know one another, and it isn’t as if you … Not that I should – necessarily – mind that.’

  For the breath of an instant Cecil’s hand had fluttered towards his pocket as if to produce a card. It dropped again. ‘My name is only Jennings,’ he said. ‘And I have a perfectly silly Christian name though it exactly describes me, I suppose – what I look like, I mean. So perhaps you wouldn’t mind about that. And though, if you don’t mind, I won’t ask you yours – not here and now, I mean; surely we do know one another now – a little? And you will come?’

  He awaited her answer, lips ajar, shoulders stooping, as if in expectation of manna from heaven.

  ‘And meanwhile, I suppose, I am to keep this hand somehow covered up!’ There may have been the faintest ring of defiance in her tone, and yet, it seemed, not defiance of him. ‘Very well, then. I’ll come. And then you promise to give me my glove? Not because it’s of much value – even to me; but because I was already thinking of buying another pair of gloves and – and losing them and so – well, that’s settled, then.’

  At this poor Cecil was more confused and dismayed than he could have imagined p
ossible. He had suddenly become aware of but one small fraction of himself, the dove-grey, suède-clad hand that held his cane. ‘I don’t see how you can ever forgive me,’ he blurted with crimson cheeks beneath the green. ‘I had no idea —’

  ‘Why, how should you? And there’s nothing to forgive as I know of. And now I must be off.’

  She was gone. Cecil was alone again. As much alone as if he stood high up on a desert island, safe after shipwreck. But gradually the bustle and babel, the sights and sounds and smells of the street returned to his perception. He came to himself, and suddenly realizing the enormity of these proceedings, was utterly at a loss how to look, to move, to free himself, to find his bearings. But the hateful shops at last were left behind him; and, gently forging his course along familiar pavements and yet all but into a world that until that moment he had never even dreamed to exist, he was soon safely home.

  Until that now remote day when Cecil had picked up the stranger’s glove, his secrets had been chiefly of an inward kind. His outer life, his funny little groping ways and traits and fads and interests and everything he possessed, including his tailor’s and hatter’s bills – all these Grummumma had shared to the full. Not that she ever openly intruded. Not that she exacted confidence. There are other methods of opening a lock than by forcing it. But apart from that, it is difficult to associate ladies of unusually ample proportions with the activities of the spy. Cecil knew perfectly well, and had been again and again assured that anything Grummumma might do would always be kindly meant. She invariably had his happiness at heart and watched over it, too. It was her nature, not only in regard to Cecil but to the world at large. Indeed, those fine black eyes of hers appeared to have so extensive a range that any attempt at concealment or subterfuge would be a mere waste of ingenuity.