Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Eirene rose to her feet. ‘To think,’ she sobbed, ‘that I should live to listen to this. Why, you must have known her for ages. She has corrupted every vestige of nice feeling you ever had. And you sit there without caring a fig what I suffer. I detest the very sight of you.’ She broke into a renewed flood of tears, and hastened out of the room.

  Strangely enough, though her last remark was intended to be the truth, the frail creature had suddenly discovered that she was as near as she ever would be to being in love. In her frantic haste to be alone with her rage and resentment, she managed to push past Grummumma, who attempted to intercept her in the hall. She managed even to refrain from enlightening that lady regarding the cause of the little scene she had been too late to interrupt. Grummumma, however, was by nature and habit a sagacious woman, and knew when to hold back. To have succeeded in pumping a little emotion into Eirene was almost as much of an achievement as to have succeeded in pumping whatever she had managed to pump into the mind of Miss Simcox. She awaited her little tea-party with folded hands.

  And almost before Cecil had any opportunity to realize that the tournament had begun, it was over. The odds had been appalling. The only ally of the young stranger had scarcely uttered a word. With eyes fixed now on the floriations of the drawing-room carpet, and now on Canon Bagshot’s ecclesiastical boots, Cecil had sat mutely listening to the talk. Indeed, no better prize could be offered in recognition of Grummumma’s tactics than the fact that never at any moment was there any real opening for him. No kind of social gathering from a school treat to a tête-à-tête with a philanthropic duchess could exhaust Canon Bagshot’s finesse. And Mrs le Mercier had all her life apparently been an authority on the grievances of shop-assistants. Eirene, with her puffy hair, elegant hands, and pale, fine features, merely held a watching brief, though she saw to it that their guest was never without the creamiest and the chocolatest of the cakes for tea – just to give her something to do with her fingers while she tried to hold her own with her tongue.

  As for ‘dear Miss Bolsover’, she rolled her blue eyes and occasionally tapped with her blunt-toed shoe (but rather like a dog thumping its tail-stump than a cat purring), and remained tactful to the last degree. If the parlour-maid had been given three guesses as to which of the party in the drawing-room had been responsible for the presence of the young lady in black in its midst, Miss Bolsover would almost certainly have been given the glory of being the last runner-up.

  And the dark young lady herself – poor Cecil writhed in the consciousness that the fatal hindrance to any possibility of her enjoying this little parlour game was his own share in it. There was a cold, clear ring in her voice, as different from the others as a silver bugle is from a bassoon. She was being flayed alive, of course, as dexterously as a professional Chinese could have managed it. But then life, even the few years she had enjoyed of it, had more or less accustomed her to the process. And it is miraculous how swiftly Nature can produce new skins. Besides, how much easier it is to endure any kind of torture, even that of tongues, in a good cause! And good cause it must be, since it was poor Cecil’s, sitting there as dumb as a fish, and that out of water, in his dark-green shade. That he could hardly boast of being much in the way of a ‘young fellow’ was proved by the elegant company she was keeping. That he therefore needed her championship the more was somehow proved by the fact that Canon Bagshot was at this moment urbanely stooping over her with a second cup of tea.

  ‘I garther, then, Miss Simcox, the Roman Cartholic Church is a little less intrusive than it is usually assumed to be.’

  ‘Though not, it seems,’ interrupted Grummumma, ‘to the extent of allowing you to join a Guild in connection with a Sister Establishment. Otherwise, I understand, you are free to believe pretty much what you prefer.’

  Miss Simcox was at this moment doing her utmost to appear at her ease with a cup of tea in one gloved hand and the cream-clogged éclair that Eirene had hospitably palmed off on her with the other. ‘Oh, no, not believe,’ she cried almost brightly. ‘I thought you were referring to what it would be good for me to do.’

  ‘And surely,’ mused Grummumma persuasively, ‘actions speak louder than words.’

  ‘But that’s a proverb, isn’t it?’ suggested her visitor doubtfully. ‘I remember once hearing someone say that very thing to Father Browne; I forget what about.’ At her glance, Canon Bagshot hastily resumed the smile that had begun to fade away across his face.

  ‘And what was Father Browne’s reply?’ he inquired indulgently.

  ‘He said, in that case, one should take very good care not to deafen oneself.’

  ‘And what do you imagine, Miss Simcox, he meant by that?’ inquired Mrs le Mercier, with a roll of her fine eyes.

  ‘Answers are useless,’ interposed Miss Bolsover, ‘that merely confuse things, and especially where principles are at stake.’

  ‘What do you think, Cecil?’ continued Grummumma, swooping round on her grandson with the éclat of a squadron of cavalry. ‘You are being remarkably silent this afternoon, even for you. Though no doubt you have discussed the question?’

  The green shade shifted uneasily. ‘I suppose what Father Browne meant,’ Cecil faltered, ‘is that what one does is not necessarily a proof of what one is. At least one may hope not – always. I suppose motive counts, and that we can never really know one another. What’s inside, I mean. The rest may be chiefly advertisement. But it’s not much good asking me. I don’t indulge in actions.’

  ‘Dear, dear, dear!’ cried Grummumma crisply, ‘deeper and deeper! I wonder what Canon Bagshot is thinking of such heresies.’

  She did not pause, however, to inquire, but at once turned the stream of conversation in the direction of the Shop Acts, and was presently assuring her visitor how much, much brighter she must be thankful to realize her lot in life now was, compared with that of the young ladies who worked in drapers’ establishments twenty or thirty years ago, when there was no early closing, when no ‘assistant’ was ever out on the streets until after ten o’clock, and on Saturdays – imagine it! – not before midnight. ‘The evils of such a system! And the living-in conditions!’ She lifted her plump hands in horror from her lap. ‘They were, I understand, simply too dreadful for description. Anaemia, pernicious and otherwise, was rampant, I believe. And far worse things than anaemia! The committee of which my dear father was chairman was shocked beyond words. But now everything is changed. You are free, Miss Simcox, for a little pleasant gossip, are you not, almost at any hour of the day?’

  The dark eyes of her visitor, from under her small black hat, watched every expression of the old handsome face. Except for a slight increase of pallor, her own showed no trace of the fires that were smouldering within. Her wits, too, a little more nimble perhaps than Grummumma supposed them to be, were rapidly accustoming themselves to a method of attack with which they were not wholly unfamiliar. It would be as refreshing as a plunge into a cold bath to let these good people realize her real opinions of them – to give as good as she was getting, and so quietly too that ‘moddam’ would remember it to her dying day.

  Her glance wandered for an instant resolutely from face to face, passed on softly from flaxen Eirene’s, then rested on Cecil. He was sitting with folded hands and downcast head as if, poor thing, this was a Home for the Feeble-minded and she herself was an applicant who could not afford the fees. If he had been a blind mute, he could hardly have looked more immobile. The angry flames within languished, went out. She felt suddenly limp and helpless and was just about to prove to Grummumma how swimming a victory was hers, when the groping figure in front of her pushed out his chin and remarked that if what Mrs le Mercier had said were true, then men must be worse devils than he had thought possible. ‘If I had my way,’ he burst out passionately, ‘I’d burn the whole “Parade” down.’

  ‘Exactly, my dear boy,’ retorted Grummumma, ‘and be off next morning (if you escaped the police) to find another hatter and hairdresser and haberdasher. Oh
, Cecil, Cecil! Miss Simcox is perfectly well aware, my dear boy, of her employer’s difficulties. We have in this world to face things as they are. And civilization is impossible without give and take on all sides.’

  ‘Yes,’ cried Cecil ferociously, ‘and who does the taking, I should like to know?’

  ‘But surely, dear lad,’ urged Canon Bagshot amiably, ‘we must not mix up things as they ought to be with things as they are. We must push gently on from one to the other. Progress is step by step, not by violent eruptions.

  Not in vain [he cleared his throat], not in vain the distance beacons.

  Forward, forward let us range:

  Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

  That surely is not only poetry, but all that makes for sobriety and discretion. And are we not missing the whole point of what has been said? It is that the conditions of shop life have been very much improved. We are – I agree in only a small respect – congratulating ourselves. Is not that so, Miss Simcox?’

  Miss Simcox had put down her cup once and for all at last. She glanced a little hesitantly about her. The green shade had lowered itself once more. Not a feature was visible; the delicate hands were clenched tight on the chair. ‘Shop life?’ she said, ‘Oh, yes!’ And she looked at Canon Bagshot. ‘But then I don’t see how people can know what other people’s lives are really like. And what does it matter? I am perfectly happy as I am.’

  ‘And that,’ said Grummumma, rising with an almost majestic urbanity, ‘is the most sensible remark I have heard for many a day. If every class and degree could say that, our difficulties would be at an end. My stepdaughter – my grandson’s mother – Mrs Mortimer FitzKelly – once had a young nursemaid who …’ With the amplest of smiles and the most elastic of gestures she had inserted herself between the two young people, and was already proffering her hand. Eirene had slipped over to the piano, in hasty search apparently of a suddenly remembered promise to perform. Miss Bolsover had already engaged the canon in talk. The contest was over.

  And at this precise moment Cecil dragged himself to his feet, as if to re-enter the lists. But in vain. He blundered forward only to find that Grummumma had exquisitely eluded him, and that their guest was already well on her way out – out of touch, out of hearing, even of hail.

  His head twisted aimlessly on his shoulders, like a rusty smoke cowl in a breeze. A cloud swept over his dejected eyes. He turned irresolutely as if for help.

  ‘You poor dear boy,’ cried Mrs le Mercier, as she hastily re-entered the room, ‘I am afraid Dr Lodge has been far too precipitant. You look positively worn out.’

  But Cecil was already pushing his way out of the room. And as with hand upon the banisters he groped his way on from stair to stair, he caught only the last word or two of what Grummumma was saying: ‘Just a soupçon of savoir-faire, poor little thing; and she might be almost presentable.’

  It was Eirene who tapped at his door a few minutes later. She turned the handle, but in vain.

  ‘Cecil, dear,’ a whisper came, ‘it’s only me. Are you ill? Is anything the matter?’ But since no answer of any kind sounded out of the vacancy beyond, there was nothing for it but to hope for the best.

  Miss Simcox’s champion can hardly be said to have appeared in shining armour. For an unconscionable time he sat by his dressing-table, his hands clasped between his knees. He was attempting to think, to argue, to explain, to plan, and all this at the same moment. The result was little more serviceable than the rotations of a squirrel in a cage. Nor did the chattering of his teeth afford him any particular help in the crisis.

  During the next few days, though never before in his memory had balms so gentle and precious been poured upon his head, Cecil realized that he was a prisoner closely guarded, with a family physician for chief warden. Of his two devotees, he much preferred Grummumma. She at least made no attempt to suggest that she was an ally he had treacherously stabbed in the back.

  It was the faint, far-away pathos in Eirene’s tones, the gentle insinuations in her manner – ‘See how forbearing I am!’ – that corroded every hour he spent in her company; while always between them lurked the remembrance, never referred to, that he had asked her help, had flung himself on her mercy, and that she had at least not given him away. She had so little given him away, indeed, that every touch of hand and wooing cadence of the grieved voice assured him that she was in fact keeping him entirely for herself. Moreover, what she and Grummumma might have managed unaided was made the more easy by the thermometer and the weather.

  There was no doubt Cecil was ill, though the most distressing of his symptoms – the mind that revolved on and on in anguish at his own helplessness – remained concealed. It was a helplessness, nonetheless, awaiting only the very shadow of an opportunity to break free.

  About eleven o’clock on the Tuesday morning after Mrs le Mercier’s unusual visitor had come and gone, the clouds over Cecil’s birthplace broke gently and then cleared completely away. It fell to Eirene to take him, well wrapped up and looking more like a hopeless invalid than ever, on his next constitutional. And Cecil chose for it a route exactly opposite to that which would have led them towards the shops.

  ‘I often wonder,’ she began speculating, in her lately acquired plaintive tones, ‘what you really and truly think of people, Cecil. You always seem to me to have much more definite “views” about them than most men of your age. And they don’t seem to be very high ones – the views, I mean. Why’s that?’

  ‘You mean,’ said Cecil, speaking out of the turned-up collar of his overcoat, ‘that as I can only see their lower halves, I cannot be any judge of their upper. You don’t seem to realize that a person’s character is scrawled all over him – over his boots even, rough-hew them as he will.’ The reply would have been almost sprightly if it had not sounded so bitter.

  ‘You don’t mean surely that cheap shoes and cotton stockings necessarily mean common minds? That would be too unfair.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Cecil stubbornly, ‘that what’s bred in the soul comes out in the ankle. It’s not merely what a person puts on his feet, but how he uses them. Besides, aren’t there laces and buttons and buckles and so on? Don’t we walk? Compare the kindly cow with the gazelle. And my God, Eirene, you don’t suppose I can’t even see up as far as the breast-bone where the hollow is where the heart should be?’

  ‘I really don’t know what’s come over you,’ said Eirene. ‘It doesn’t even seem to be yourself talking. You seem to have got so dreadfully clever and never to mean what you say. When you are not purposely misunderstanding one, you are – well once you wouldn’t have said, “my God”, Cecil. And you used not to be coarse.’

  ‘No,’ said Cecil.

  ‘And I didn’t realize until this moment,’ she pursued, ‘that you were an expert in ankles and that kind of thing. You remember how we once agreed that we could always guess in whose company Kitty had been by her manner. She just catches whoever’s about,’ she added sportively, ‘a sort of social mumps or German measles. But I never noticed that in you before. Besides,’ and there was now a genuine hint of anxiety in her voice, ‘you don’t look a bit better. You talk to me as if you hated me body and soul; as if you almost detested me – physically, I mean. And the whole time I am with you – and Auntie agrees – you appear to be thinking of something else. What is the good of it all? Do you suppose I have never had my own little disillusionments and am not perfectly thankful to have found out that they were disillusionments? Nothing I can do or say seems of the least good. Why, if you had even asked my help —’ The voice really faltered now, and fell silent.

  But Cecil, unlike most young men, could not realize how disturbing an experience it can be to be walking in the street with a companion positively shedding tears. He just walked on. He continued meanwhile for a moment or two to explore what Eirene had said.

  ‘I think,’ he replied at last, faintly but firmly, ‘I have had enough of this ridiculous imitation str
eet. And I hate the mock. We’ll turn back.’

  There was little of the war-horse apparent in him as he wheeled. His mind had nonetheless suddenly cleared. It was finally made up. And he stepped out before his companion as if they had once and for all arranged the future between them. At the gate – the bland, white face of Grummumma’s house, flinging its reflected sunshine in their faces under the low, delicate, pale blue arch of the sky – Eirene paused. ‘You mean,’ she said with a choking voice, ‘that you would prefer me to be – not to be a friend. Well, so be it, Cecil. I can’t help myself. I must just bear it. But you shall find that I am in spite of you.’

  This pathetic challenge, however, only served to consolidate Cecil’s resolution. At three o’clock in the afternoon Grummumma was accustomed to shut herself up in her bedroom for half an hour – to relax. She relaxed inch by inch, and then the complete area. It was Eirene’s turn to be sentinel again. She now sat playing very plaintive Mendelssohn in the drawing-room with the door wide open, and most of her attention, if not her actual eye, fixed on the staircase that descended into view beyond it. Cecil had left her there after lunch, and, as she had expected, now sat in his own room, drinking in the winning strains.

  At half-past four he sent word by the parlour-maid that he would not be down to tea; and Grummumma having returned from relaxing, the two confederates nibbled their thin bread and butter in secret, and exchanged policies. Nonetheless, as if a bird in the air had carried the note, Cecil with door ajar realized the trend of their hushed talk, though he was honestly beyond the possibility of catching any single word of it. ‘What was to happen now?’ he was thinking, the eyes in his aching head fixed upon his teacup. At half-past five Grummumma went out. Eirene was evidently doing double duty.

  At a quarter to seven Mr Mallow, Canon Bagshot’s latest curate, looked in, with a new novel from Mudie’s under his arm. This, he assured Eirene so eagerly that he might himself have been its author, was well worth reading. ‘There’s so much clap-trap, so much positive slush published nowadays,’ he asserted, ‘that any piece of fiction with a trace of conviction in it – and I don’t mean necessarily moral conviction – just conviction, is some thing to be thankful for. One must face the facts.’