Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  The two young people went on in an eternity that was a moment until they had reached a point where a few silver birches and hazels thinly screened them from the world they had for that moment left behind them. There the young woman came suddenly to a standstill.

  ‘I must go back in a minute,’ she said. ‘And if you don’t mind, I would prefer to go back alone. Meanwhile we are here, and even a little time is a long time when there’s not much left.’ She laughed softly.

  Irked by the obstacle of the rooty bank at this bend, the water gurgled as if in echo of a never-ending lullaby. At least to some ears it might sound so, though for Cecil it resembled the monologue of a hopeless voice babbling of everlasting darkness. ‘You have only just come,’ he said, ‘and now you talk about saying good-bye.’

  ‘I didn’t wish to. I must.’

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘all I am going to say to you is this; and would you please listen as patiently as you can? Without interrupting me, I mean. It’s – it’s nothing much.’ He waved his fingers in the air, took a deep breath, and plunged on. ‘What I mean is this: I haven’t very much money now, but I have some. A little income, you know, only four or five hundred a year – but certain. It’s horribly little to go on with, but even Grummumma can’t keep me out of a good deal more than that in a few years’ time. Can’t. Apart from that, and I don’t mind saying it a bit, she can’t live for ever. I don’t want her even to live as long as that. Honestly I don’t. I wouldn’t so much mind if she had driven me – just harassed me, you know. It would have done me good. But she’s held so tight to the bit, that my mouth’s all covered with blood. I know now what’s gone on all along. It’s her way, her self, her domination. That’s what Scarlet Women are made of. I see it now even though they – well, that’s what I mean. And I simply can’t stand it any longer. Possibly I should have stood it – at least for some little time – if you hadn’t come. If you hadn’t come, I believe I should have gone mouldering on like a suet pudding in a damp pantry. Oh, yes, I know what I am talking about all right! I saw a slice of that once – mildewed – on my own plate, when my nurse didn’t think my eyes could see under the bandage.’

  Cecil breathed again. He paused. Then: ‘What I am saying is this,’ he went on tranquilly, ‘would you mind telling me how we can get married? I mean what do they do? I don’t mean the Canon Bagshot way. I know that’s impossible. But isn’t there some place where you can get married just for the time being, without, I mean, going to a church? And especially, if you are a Roman Catholic. Couldn’t we go to a church later on, don’t you think, when we have got safely away? I want to get married to you at once if we can – if I may. And yet I don’t think I have even told you I love you. I don’t think there was any reason to say that. You must have thought me even a more unutterable idiot than you must think me if you think that. I don’t want to be impatient. I mean, I don’t want to vex you into saying, no – that is, if you won’t marry me. You see, I am so dreadfully ignorant of all these things. But you said just now that if you weren’t back in your home by eleven it would be the streets on Monday. What did you mean by that, please?’

  It was ludicrous what a muddle the young man was in; and yet how easy his listener was finding it to sort him all out and to see exactly not only where the commas and semicolons ought to have come in this remarkable piece of oratory, but also the full stop, the ‘period’, as she had been taught to call it when she was (for a year or two) at school. That was before the drapery business set in. That was before her father went off with the other woman. That was before even the none-too-particular but good-humoured woman next door began to take care of her for a time and to learn her in certain ways how it is possible when the worst comes to the worst, to take care of oneself. But all this was quite a long, long, long time before she had met this young man with the green shade over his eyes.

  There was the look almost of a half-witted creature on her face as she now stood staring at the water. And yet, like a singularly intelligent canary or like a singularly instinctive black-cap or mocking-bird, she was trying over – as rapidly as a Paganini might a phrase in Mozart – she was trying over half a dozen tunes in which to reply. She chose the hardest.

  ‘When I was engaged – and never mind who,’ she said, ‘we found out about getting married without a parson. He knew all about all that. You go to what is called a Registry Office. We thought – we might have to. Do you see? It would, of course, have been everlasting damnation to me, if we had; or at any rate a good many centuries of Purgatory. And to you – why! Oh, don’t I know it! – it would be the dismalest and most horrible thing you ever conceived of doing in the whole of your life. No, no, I can’t marry you. I don’t wish to. Oh, no. Don’t let us waste this little time in talking of foolish things like that. I couldn’t marry you. I couldn’t. I don’t wish to. Not go down like that, after all you have been, and said. I don’t even mind confessing now – as you see! – that I thought all this out even after the first time we met on the Parade. It was vile of me, I know, but it’s my character. I always see ahead. From the very first instant. When you are in my – well, some girls wait for marriage, just for the chance. They even … But never mind; that’s all over now. Until you came I never had a friend – not a friend. Did you really think I would ever risk – when you knew everything – losing… Oh, you don’t seem to realize’ – she suddenly turned on him – ‘how hopelessly, blindly unpractical and unworldly you are. You say you are a fool: well, you are. A fool in all that I’m not. I have been soaked in the other thing ever since I was born. If you asked me to go to the devil with you, I’d go – gladly. But you wouldn’t. And knowing that, I’d rather go alone. And yet, before God, I love you. I say, I love you. It breaks my heart to say it. I didn’t know it was possible. I didn’t know what it meant. And yet, though you won’t, though you can’t understand about the rest of me … But don’t listen to that. What’s the use if I never could and never, never would say, yes. Just listen only to what I am saying now. I love you. It’s spelt l-o-v-e.’ She gazed at the half-hidden face with an agonized smile. ‘And simply because of that, it must be – we must leave each other here. It’s almost night now. Don’t let us talk any more. But you must be able to see I couldn’t go back with you now. My legs wouldn’t bear me. And honestly I don’t think I could manage to say good-bye. So would you’ – a fantastic, almost jocular note had edged into her curious voice – a voice like that of a delicate instrument whose sound-box has somehow or other become cracked, muting the clearer timbre of the thing, ‘so would you please kiss me, and I’ll be gone.’

  Cecil groped for the hand that hung limp and inert beside the old serge skirt. He lifted it, and looked at its fingers. He counted them. They were long and narrow-boned fingers, and belonging, as they did, not to her right hand, they were a little less marked with work.

  ‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he muttered as if to himself at last, and still examining them in the clarifying focus afforded by his shade, ‘I don’t want to tell you how shockingly miserable you are making me. You think I am a coward. You don’t believe I could ever do anything, ever break free. You say you love me – you say you do – but you don’t believe in me, not at all. I might just as well be a child for all that you are saying. But then I know it can’t mean anything. I mean, I know you couldn’t help saying it, and I can’t tell you what I think of you for having said it. But you see, what I feel is that if you are going to keep to what you say – even if after all you weren’t utterly meaning it – then I must see your face. I couldn’t kiss you until I had, and it may be more than I can bear, more than I can manage, I mean. There isn’t any moon, either,’ he added helplessly. ‘Would you mind taking tight hold of both my hands?’

  She flung her arms away from him, took a quick step backwards, stooping low, like a dangerous animal about to spring. ‘Do you mean you are going to try that horrible thing – now?’ she cried at him. ‘Be quiet, do. You don’t know what you are saying. Be q
uiet, do. Here I am. All you can see. What more has anybody wanted? Oh, you won’t be content till you’ve skinned me to the very bone. Look at me! Oh, you will hurt yourself. You said you might die. And’ – her voice ran down the scale until she was scarcely more than whispering – ‘and how, pray, do you know what I look like? I do. You should see the looking-glass my landlady gives me. That’s where I powder my nose!’ A corrosive sardonicism had come into her voice. A look of fierce vindictiveness distorted her narrow face and her blazing, disquieted eyes. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘do try and be a little kind to me. There won’t be very much time for it, if you only knew.’

  But Cecil had followed her up, and she could retreat no farther unless she was to plunge at once into the swirling water a foot or two beneath the bank. He was lifting his chin with convulsive efforts and had thrust both hands on her shrinking shoulders as he did so. And at last, with a strangled sob, he found himself gazing eye to eye with this phantom of his dreams.

  Strangely enough, he had been without the least expectation of what that face looked like. It hadn’t seemed to matter. And now that he was scrutinizing it, only half conscious of the appalling pangs which were darting from skull to spine, it was not as if he had merely recognized her, but as if this were the first face that as a mortal creature he had ever seen at all – a landscape, a garden, a marvel, before time, lovely, earthly, yet unbelievable, all-pitying, burnt up with pain, never to be forgotten, never to be exhausted, never to be understood.

  And before he could make the slightest movement, she had taken him in her arms and had hidden his anguished and distorted and transfigured face on her breast. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘How could you do it! How dared you! Oh, dear, my dear! Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear! Have a moment’s peace. Don’t you see it will be mine too?’

  Cecil had lost ages ago all but the faintest remembrances of his childhood; or rather, he had never let himself think about it. And now he had reached a momentary, yet eternal, oblivion, though it was an oblivion fenced in by misery and pain.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, drawing back at last, still clutching at her hands, ‘I know now what you meant just then; I know what you meant. You meant you had made up your mind to kill yourself to-night – to drown yourself there. Well, then, listen to me. You don’t move an inch until you have sworn to me by the Holy Ghost you won’t do it. Do you understand? I can’t keep you, I know that. I only ask you to go away and to think it over, and to come back again here in the morning. I shall be here. But before you go, even if it’s for ever – and surely you couldn’t, you wouldn’t treat me like that! – you will promise me not to do that. Not to be so hopelessly wicked, you understand. You simply couldn’t do it, leaving me the burden.’

  The fingers in his grip seemed to consist of little else than thin bones. ‘There!’ she cried into Space, ‘isn’t that the Man all over. You don’t know what you are condemning me to, you cruel boy. You don’t know. If I told you,’ she went on rapidly, ‘that to stay here – to stay on this earth as I am – will be only to go from one thing on to another, pillar to post until … Do you suppose yours is the only tender-hearted grandmamma in the world? Or, if you knew how I long, and now of all times, to get away. And I believe even God would forgive me, if He has any longing left. Ah, well, you don’t know. And what’s the good of talking!’

  ‘But you promise?’ Cecil repeated. ‘For, after all, you are not thinking of me. You haven’t remembered what my life has been like – silly fop that I am.’

  ‘My dear,’ she sobbed brokenly, ‘your hands are all wet. I can’t really see your face, but you are shuddering all over. I will take you home after all. We can walk well apart … But no – no!’

  ‘But you promise?’ he repeated.

  Her eyes strayed from the hideous pent-house shade to the dark, secret water.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I cannot promise … But there! – God helping me – I won’t.’

  Nothing seemed to matter now. She knew all that she was. Every thought in her had seemed to have foundered in an unfathomable pit of darkness. ‘But you don’t know what you are asking,’ she added again, with a sound that might almost have been taken for laughter. ‘You are asking me to go on loving you, and that I don’t see how I shall be able to bear.’

  She drew her hands gently away and stood for a moment quietly looking at her solitary companion, as if uncertain whether or not she had ever seen him before. But in a while the illusion cleared away and she realized where she was; the darkened wood, the secret gurgling water, the empty starry sky.

  ‘Listen,’ she said at last, stooping forward, her shoulders seeming to fold themselves a little together like the curve of a bird’s wings. ‘Are you safe now?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Not in pain?’ He shook his head in his agony.

  ‘And you won’t quite forget me?’ He made no answer.

  ‘Well, then,’ she went on earnestly, like a child repeating its catechism, ‘never forget that I came to the end of my life when you came to its beginning. I didn’t know what it meant to love anybody. And I’d rather have gone. For, you see, when you looked up at me, something came here – I can’t explain, I …’

  Nor did she ever come back to explain. The sun was riding high in the heavens next morning, and the scene around Cecil alive with its scintillating summer beauty – skylarks in the empty blue, butterflies wavering from flower to flower, the bosoming waters radiant with light – when, too much worn out with pain and hopelessness to pay any attention to such elusive and illusory promises, he realized at last that she was gone never to return, and he groped his way back to Grummumma and his life.

  * As printed in SEP (1938). First published in Forum, June and September 1927.

  The Green Room*

  Only Mr Elliott’s choicer customers were in his own due season let into his little secret – namely, that at the far end of his shop – beyond, that is, the little table on which he kept his account books, his penny bottle of ink, and his rusty pen, there was an annexe. He first allowed his victims to ripen; and preferred even to see their names installed in the pages of his fat, dumpy ledger before he decided that they were really worthy of this little privilege.

  Alan, at any rate, though a young man of ample leisure and moderate means, had been browsing and pottering about on and off in the shop for weeks before he even so much as suspected there was a hidden door. He must, in his innocence, have spent pounds and pounds on volumes selected from the vulgar shelves before his own initiation.

  This was on a morning in March. Mr Elliott was tying up a parcel for him. Having no scissors handy he was burning off the ends of the string with a lighted match. And as if its small flame had snapped at the same moment both the string and the last strands of formality between them, he glanced up almost roguishly at the young man through his large round spectacles with the remark: ‘P’r’aps, sir, you would like to take a look at the books in the parlour?’ And a birdlike jerk of his round bald head indicated where the parlour was to be found.

  Alan had merely looked at him for a moment or two out of his blue eyes with his usual pensive vacancy. ‘I didn’t know there was another room,’ he said at last. ‘But then, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think there might be. I fancied these books were all the books you had.’ He glanced over the dingy hugger-mugger of second-hand literature that filled the shelves and littered the floor – a mass that would have twenty-fold justified the satiety of a Solomon.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no, sir!’ said Mr Elliott, with the pleasantest confidentiality. ‘All this is chiefly riff-raff. But I don’t mention it except to those gentlemen who are old clients, in a manner of speaking. What’s in there is all in the printed catalogue and I can always get what’s asked for. Apart from that, there’s some who – well, at any rate, I don’t, sir. But if by any chance you should care to take a look round at any time, you would, I’m sure, be very welcome. This is an oldish house, as you may have noticed, sir, and out t
here is the oldest parts of it. We call it the parlour – Mrs Elliott and me; we got it from the parties that were here before we came. Take a look now, sir, if you please; it’s a nice little place.’

  Mr Elliott drew aside. Books – and particularly old books – tend to be dusty company. This may account for the fact that few antiquarian booksellers are of Falstaffian proportions. They are more usually lean, ruminative, dryish spectators of life. The gnawing of the worm in the tome is among the more melancholy of nature’s lullabies; and the fluctuations in price of ‘firsts’ and of ‘mint states’ must incline any temperament, if not towards cynicism, at least towards the philosophical. Herodotus tells of a race of pygmies whose only diet was the odour of roses; and though morocco leather is sweeter than roses, it is even less fattening.

  Mr Elliott, however, flourished on it. He was a rotund little man with a silver watch-chain from which a gold locket dangled, and he had uncommonly small feet. He might have been a ballet-master. ‘You make your way up those four stairs, sir,’ he went on, as he ushered his customer beneath the curtain, ‘turn left down the passage, and the door’s on the right. It’s quiet in there, but that’s no harm done. No hurry, sir.’

  So Alan proceeded on his way. The drugget on the passage floor showed little trace of wear. The low panelled walls had been whitewashed. He came at last to the flowered china handle of the door beyond the turn of the passage, then stood for a moment lost in surprise. But it was the trim cobbled garden beyond the square window on his right that took his glance rather than the room itself. Yellow crocuses, laden with saffron pollen, stood wide agape in the black mould, and the greening buds of a bush of lilac were tapping softly against the glass. And above was a sky of the gentlest silken blue; wonderfully still.