Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  He turned and looked about him. The paint on wainscot and cornice must once have been of a bright apple green. It had faded now. A gate-leg table was in the far corner beyond the small-paned window; and on his left, with three shallow steps up to it, was another door. And the shelves were lined from floor to ceiling with the literary treasures which Mr Elliott kept solely for his elect. So quiet was the room that even the flitting of a clothes-moth might be audible, though the brightness of noonday now filled it to the brim. For the three poplars beyond the lilac bush were still almost as bare as the frosts of winter had made them.

  In spite of the flooding March light, in spite of this demure sprightliness after the gloom and disorder of the shop he had left behind him, Alan – as in his languid fashion he turned his head from side to side – became conscious first and foremost of the age of Mr Elliott’s pretty parlour. The paint was only a sort of ‘Let’s pretend’. The space between its walls seemed, indeed, to be as much a reservoir of time as of light. The panelled ceiling, for example, was cracked and slightly discoloured; so were the green shutter-cases to the windows; while the small and beautiful chimneypiece – its carved marble lintel depicting a Cupid with pan pipes dancing before a smiling goddess under a weeping willow – enshrined a grate that at this moment contained nothing, not even the ashes of a burnt-out fire. Its bars were rusty, and there were signs of damp in the moulded plaster above it.

  A gentle breeze was now brisking the tops of the poplar trees, but no murmur of it reached Alan where he stood. With his parcel tucked under his arm, he edged round softly from shelf to shelf, and even after so cursory an examination as this – and it was one of Mr Elliott’s principles to mark all his books in plain figures – he realized that his means were much too moderate for his appetite. He came to a standstill, a little at a loss. What was he to do next? He stifled a yawn. Then, abstracting a charming copy of Hesperides, by that ‘Human and divine’ poet, Robert Herrick, he seated himself idly on the edge of the table and began to turn over its leaves. They soon became vocal:

  Aske me, why I do not sing

  To the tension of the string.

  As I did, not long ago,

  When my numbers full did flow?

  Griefe (ay me!) hath struck my Lute,

  And my tongue – at one time – mute.

  His eye strayed on, and he read slowly – muttering the words to himself as he did so – ‘The departure of the good Daemon’:

  What can I do in Poetry,

  Now the good Spirit’s gone from me?

  Why nothing now, but lonely sit,

  And over-read what have I writ.

  Alan’s indolence was even more extreme; he was at this moment merely over-reading what he had read – and what he had read again and again and again. For the eye may be obedient while the master of the mind sits distrait and aloof. His wits had gone wool-gathering. He paused, then made yet another attempt to fix his attention on the sense of this simple quatrain. But in vain. For in a moment or two his light, clear eyes had once more withdrawn themselves from the printed page and were once more, but now more intently, exploring the small green room in which he sat.

  And as he did so – though nothing of the bright external scene around him showed any change – out of some day-dream, it seemed, of which until then he had been unaware, there had appeared to him from the world of fantasy the image of a face.

  No known or remembered face – a phantom face, as alien and inscrutable as are the apparitions that occasionally visit the mind in sleep. This in itself was not a very unusual experience. Alan was a young man of an imaginative temperament, and possessed that inward eye which is often, though not unfailingly, the bliss of solitude. And yet there was a difference. This homeless image was at once so real in effect, so clear, and yet so unexpected. Even the faint shadowy colours of the features were discernible – the eyes dark and profound, the hair drawn back over the rather narrow temples of the oval head; a longish, quiet, intent face, veiled with reverie and a sort of vigilant sorrowfulness, and yet possessing little of what at first sight might be called beauty – or what at least is usually accepted as beauty.

  So many and fleeting, of course, are the pictures that float into consciousness at the decoy of a certain kind of poetry that one hardly heeds them as they pass and fade. But this, surely, was no after-image of one of Herrick’s earthly yet ethereal Electras or Antheas or Dianemes, vanishing like the rainbows in a fountain’s falling waters. There are degrees of realization. And, whatever ‘good Spirit’ this shadowy visitant may have represented, and whatever its origin, it had struck some ‘observer’ in Alan’s mind mute indeed, and had left him curiously disquieted. It was as if in full sight of a small fishing smack peacefully becalmed beneath the noonday blue, the spars and hulk of some such phantom as the Flying Dutchman had suddenly appeared upon the smooth sea green; though this perhaps was hardly a flattering account of it. Anyhow, it had come, and now it was gone – except out of memory – as similar images do come and go.

  Mere figment of a day-dream, then, though this vision must have been, Alan found himself vacantly searching the room as if for positive corroboration of it, or at least for some kind of evidence that would explain it away. Faces are but faces, of course, whether real or imaginary, and whether they appear in the daytime or the dark, but there is at times a dweller behind the eye that looks out, though only now and again, from that small window. And this looker-out – unlike most – seemed to be innocent of any attempt at concealment. ‘Here am I …And you?’ That had seemed to be the mute question it was asking; though with no appearance of needing an answer; and, well, Alan distrusted feminine influences. He had once or twice in his brief career loved not wisely but too idealistically, and for the time being he much preferred first editions. Besides, he disliked mixing things up – and how annoying to be first slightly elated and then chilled by a mere fancy!

  The sun in his diurnal round was now casting a direct beam of light from between the poplars through one of the little panes of glass in Mr Elliott’s parlour. It limned a clear-cut shadow-pattern on the fading paint of the frame and on the floor beneath. Alan watched it and was at the same time listening – as if positively in hope of detecting that shadow’s indetectable motion!

  In the spell of this reverie, time seemed to have become of an almost material density. The past hung like cobwebs in the air. He turned his head abruptly; he was beginning to feel a little uneasy. And his eyes now fixed themselves on the narrow panelled door above the three stairs on the other side of the room. When consciousness is thus unusually alert it is more easily deceived by fancies. And yet so profound was the quiet around him it seemed improbable that the faint sound he had heard as of silk very lightly brushing against some material obstacle was imaginary. Was there a listener behind that door? Or was there not? If so, it must be one as intent as himself, but far more secret.

  For a full minute, and as steadily as a cat crouching over a mouse’s hole – though there wasn’t the least trace of the predatory on his mild fair features, he scrutinized the key in the lock. He breathed again; and then with finger in book to keep his place tiptoed across the room and gently – by a mere finger’s breadth – opened the door. Another moment and he had pushed it wider. Nothing there. Exactly as he had expected, of course, and yet – why at the same moment was he both disappointed and relieved?

  He had exposed a narrow staircase – unstained, uncarpeted. Less than a dozen steep steps up was another door – a shut door, with yet another pretty flowered china handle and china finger-plates to it. A rather unusual staircase, too, he realized, since, unless one or other of its two doors were open, it must continually be in darkness. But you never know what oddity is going to present itself next in an old rambling house. How many human beings, he speculated, as he scanned this steep and narrow vacancy, must in the two or three centuries gone by have ascended and descended that narrow ladder – as abrupt as that of Jacob’s dream? They had come, disguised in t
he changing fashions of their time; they had gone, leaving apparently not a wrack behind.

  Well, that was that. This March morning might be speciously bright and sunny, but in spite of its sunshine it was cold. Books, too, may cheer the mind, but even when used as fuel they are apt to fail to warm the body, and rust on an empty grate diminishes any illusion of heat its bars might otherwise convey. Alan sighed, suddenly aware that something which had promised to be at least an arresting little experience had failed him. The phantasmal face so vividly seen, and even watched for a moment, had already become a little blurred in memory. And now there was a good deal more disappointment in his mind than relief. He felt like someone who has been cheated at a game he never intended to play. A particularly inappropriate simile, nonetheless, for he hadn’t the smallest notion what the stakes had been, or, for that matter, what the game. He took up his hat and walking-stick, and still almost on tiptoe, and after quietly but firmly shutting both doors behind him, went back into the shop.

  ‘I think I will take this, please,’ he said almost apologetically to the old bookseller, who with his hands under his black coat-tails was now surveying the busy world from his own doorstep.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ Mr Elliott wheeled about and accepted the volume with that sprightly turn of his podgy wrist with which he always welcomed a book that was about to leave him for ever. ‘Ah, the Hesperides, sir. I’ll put the three into one parcel. A nice tall clean copy, I see. It came, if memory serves me right, from the library of Colonel Anstey, sir, who purchased the Talbot letters – and at a very reasonable price, too. Now if I had a first in this condition! …’

  Alan dutifully smiled. ‘I found it in the parlour,’ he said. ‘What a charming little room – and garden too; I had no idea the house was so old. Who lived in it before you did? I suppose it wasn’t always a bookshop?’

  He tried in vain to speak naturally and not as if he had plums in his mouth.

  ‘Lived here before me, now?’ the bookseller repeated ruminatively. ‘Well, sir, there was first, of course, my immediate predecessor. He came before me; and we took over his stock. Something of a disappointment, too, when I came to go through with it.’

  ‘And before him?’ Alan persisted.

  ‘Before him, sir? I fancy this was what might be called a private house. You could see if you looked round a bit how it has been converted. It was a doctor’s, I understand – a Dr Marchmont’s. And what we call the parlour, sir, from which you have just emerged, was always, I take it, a sort of book room. Leastways some of the books there now were there then – with the book-plate and all. You see, the Mr Brown who came before me and who, as I say, converted the house, he bought the doctor’s library. Not merely medical and professional works neither. There was some choice stuff besides; and a few moderate specimens of what is known in the trade as the curious, sir. Not that I go out of my way for it, myself.’

  Alan paused in the doorway, parcel in hand.

  ‘A bachelor, I suppose?’

  ‘The doctor, sir, or Mr Brown?’

  ‘The doctor.’

  ‘Well, now, that I couldn’t rightly say,’ replied Mr Elliott cheerfully. ‘Let us hope not. They tell me, sir, it makes things seem more homely-like to have a female about the house. And’ – he raised his voice a little – ‘I’ll warrant that Mrs Elliott, sir, if she were here to say so, would bear me out.’

  Mrs Elliott, in fact, a pasty-looking old woman, with a mouth like a cod’s and a large marketing basket on her arm, was at this moment emerging out from behind a curtained doorway. Possibly her husband had caught a glimpse of her reflection in his spectacles. She came on with a beetle-like deliberation.

  ‘What’s that you were saying about me, Mr Elliott?’ she said.

  ‘This gentleman was inquiring, my love, if Dr Marchmont-as-was lived in a state of single blessedness or if there was a lady in the case.’

  Mrs Elliott fixed a slow, flat look on her husband, and then on Alan.

  ‘There was a sister or niece or something, so they say. But I never knew anything about them, and don’t want to,’ she declared. And Alan, a little chilled by her demeanour, left the shop.

  Not that that one fish-like glance of Mrs Elliott’s censorious eye had by any means freed his fancy of what had passed. In the days that followed he could never for an instant be sure when or where the face that reverie had somehow conjured up out of the recesses of his mind on his first visit to the old bookseller’s parlour was not about to reappear. And it chose the oddest of moments. Even when his attention was definitely fixed on other things it would waft itself into his consciousness again – and always with the same serene yet vivid, naïve yet serious question in the eyes – a question surely that only life itself could answer, and that not always with a like candour or generosity. Alan was an obstinate young man in spite of appearances. But to have the rudiments of an imagination is one thing, to be at the beck and call of every passing fancy is quite another. He was not, he reassured himself, as silly as all that. He held out for days together; and then when he had been left for twenty-four hours wholly at peace – he suddenly succumbed.

  A westering sun was sharply gilding its windows when he once more made his way into Mr Elliott’s parlour, it was empty. And almost at the same instant he realized how anxious he had been that this should be so, and how insipid a bait as such the little room now proved to be. He hadn’t expected that. And yet – not exactly insipid; its flavour had definitely soured. He wished he had never come; he tried to make up his mind to go. Ill at ease, angry with himself, and as if in open defiance of some inward mentor, he took down at random a fusty old quarto from its shelf and seating himself on a chair by the table, he began, or rather attempted, to read.

  Instead, with downcast eyes shelled in by the palm of his hand, and leaning gently on his elbow in an attitude not unlike that of the slippered and pensive Keats in the portrait, he found himself listening again. He did more than listen. Every nerve in his body was stretched taut. And time ebbed away. At this tension his mind began to wander off again into a dreamlike vacuum of its own, when, ‘What was that?’ a voice within whispered at him. A curious thrill ebbed through his body. It was as though unseen fingers had tugged at a wire – with no bell at the end of it. For this was no sound he had heard – no stir of the air. And yet in effect it so nearly resembled one that it might have been only the sigh of the blast of the east wind at the window. He waited a minute, then, with a slight shiver, glanced up covertly but steadily through his fingers.

  He was shocked – by what he saw – yet not astonished. It seemed as if his whole body had become empty and yet remained as inert and heavy as lead. He was no longer alone. The figure that stood before him in the darker corner there, and only a few paces away, was no less sharply visible and even more actual in effect than the objects around her. One hand, from a loose sleeve, resting on the edge of the door to the staircase, she stood looking at him, her right foot with its high-heeled shoe poised delicately on the lowest of the three steps. With head twisted back sidelong over her narrow shoulder, her eyes were fixed on this earthly visitor to her haunts – as he sat, hand to forehead, drawn up stiff and chill at the table. She was watching Alan. And the face, though with even fewer claims to be beautiful, and none to be better than knowing and wide-awake, was without any question the face he had shared with Herrick’s Hesperides.

  A peculiar vacancy – like a cold mist up from the sea – seemed to have spread over his mind, and yet he was alert to his very finger-tips. Had she seen he had seen her? He couldn’t tell. It was as cold in the tiny room as if the windows were wide open and the garden beyond them full of snow. The late afternoon light, though bleakly clear, was already thinning away, and, victim of this silly decoy, he was a prisoner who in order to regain his freedom must pass her way out. He stirred in his chair, his eyes now fixed again on the book beneath them.

  And then at last, as if with confidence restored, he withdrew his hand from his face, lifted
his head, and affecting a boldness he far from felt, deliberately confronted his visitor. At this the expression on her features – her whole attitude – changed too. She had only at this moment seen that he had seen her, then? The arm dropped languidly to her side. Her listless body turned a little, her shoulders slightly lifted themselves, and a faint provocative smile came into her face, while the dark jaded eyes resting on his own remained half mocking, half deprecatory – almost as if the two of them, he and she, were old cronies who had met again after a long absence from one another, with ancient secrets awaiting discreet discussion. With a desperate effort Alan managed to refrain from making any answering signal of recognition. He stared back with a face as blank as a turnip. How he knew with such complete assurance that his visitor was not of this world he never attempted to explain to himself. Real! She was at least as real as a clearly lit reflection of anything seen in a looking-glass, and in effect on his mind was more positive than the very chair on which he was sitting and the table beneath his elbow to which that chair was drawn up. For this was a reality of the soul, and not of the senses. Indeed, he himself might be the ghost and she the dominating pervasive actuality.

  But even if he had been able to speak he had no words with which to express himself. He was shuddering with cold and had suddenly become horribly fatigued and exhausted. He wanted to ‘get out’ of all this and yet knew not only that this phantasm must have been lying in wait for him, but that sooner or later she would compel him to find out what she wanted of him, that she meant to be satisfied. Her face continued to change in expression even while he watched her. Its assurance seemed to intensify. The head stooped forward a little; the narrow, pallid, slanting eyelids momentarily closed; and then, with a gesture not merely of arm or shoulder but of her whole body, she once more fixed him with a gaze more intense, more challenging, more crammed with meaning than he had supposed possible in any human eye. It was as if some small wicket gate into the glooms of Purgatory had suddenly become thronged with bright-lit faces.