Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Exiled from hope and God.

  And you I loved, who once loved me,

  And shook with pangs this mortal frame,

  Were sunk to such an infamy

  That when I called your name,

  Its knell so racked that sentient clay

  That my lost spirit lurking near,

  Wailed, liked the damned, and fled away –

  And woke me, stark with Fear.

  He pondered a moment, turned back the leaf again, and holding the book open with his dumpy forefinger, ‘A Jew, now,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I never heard any mention of a Jew. But what, if you follow me,’ he added, tapping on the open page with his spectacles, ‘what I feel about such things as these is that they’re not so much what may be called mournful as morbid, sir. They rankle. I don’t say, mind you, there isn’t a ring of truth in them – but it’s so put, if you follow me, as to make it worse. Why, if all our little mistakes were dealt with in such a vengeful spirit as this – as this, where would any of us be? And death … Say things out, sir, by all means. But what things? It isn’t human nature. And what’s more,’ he finished pensively, ‘I haven’t noticed that the stuff sells much the better for it.’

  Alan had listened but had not paid much attention to these moralizings. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that you think the book did actually belong to the lady who lived here, and that – that it was she herself who wrote the poems? But then, you see, it’s E.F. on the cover, and I thought you said the name was Marchmont?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Marchmont. Between you and me, there was a Mrs, I understand; but she went away. And who this young woman was I don’t rightly know. Not much good, I fancy. At least –’ He emptily eyed again the blurred lettering of the poem. ‘But there, sir,’ he went on with decision, ‘there’s no need that I can see to worry about that. The whole thing’s a good many years gone, and what consequence is it now? You’d be astonished how few of my customers really care who wrote a book so long as wrote it was. Which is not to suggest that if we get someone – someone with a name, I mean – to lay out the full story of the young woman as a sort of foreword, there might not be money in it. There might be. It doesn’t much signify nowadays what you say about the dead, not legally, I mean. And especially these poets, sir. It all goes in under “biography”. Besides, a suicide’s a suicide all the world over. On the other hand’ – and he glanced over his shoulder – ‘I rather fancy Mrs E. wouldn’t care to be mixed up in the affair. What she reads she never much approves of, though that’s the kind of reading she likes best. The ladies can be so very scrupulous.’

  Alan had not seen the old bookseller in quite so bright a light as this before.

  ‘What I was wondering, Mr Elliott,’ he replied in tones so frigid they suggested he was at least twenty years older than he appeared to be, ‘is whether you would have any objection to my sending the book myself to the printers. It’s merely an idea. One can’t tell. It could do no harm. Perhaps whoever it was who wrote the poems may have hoped some day to get them printed – you never know. It would be at my expense, of course. I shouldn’t dream of taking a penny piece and I would rather there were no introduction – by anyone. There need be no name or address on the title-page, need there? But this is, of course, only if you see no objection?’

  Mr Elliott had once more lifted by an inch or two the back cover of the exercise book, as if possibly in search of the photograph. He found only this pencilled scrawl:

  Well, well, well! squeaked the kitten to the cat;

  Mousie refuses to play any more! so that’s the end of that!

  He shut up the book and rested his small plump hand on it.

  ‘I suppose, sir,’ he inquired discreetly, ‘there isn’t any risk of any infringement of copyright? I mean,’ he added, twisting round his unspectacled face a little in Alan’s direction, ‘there isn’t likely to be anybody who would recognize what’s in here? I am not, of course, referring to the photograph, but a book, even nowadays, may be what you may call too true-spoken – when it’s new, I mean. And it’s not so much Mrs E. I have in mind now as the police’ – he whispered the word – ‘the police.’

  Alan returned his blurred glance without flinching.

  ‘Oh, no …’ he said. ‘Besides, I should merely put E.F. on the title-page and say it had been printed privately. I am quite prepared to take the risk.’

  The cold tones of the young man seemed to have a little daunted the old bookseller.

  ‘Very well, sir. I will have just a word with a young lawyer friend of mine, and if that’s all right, why, sir, you are welcome.’

  ‘And the books could be sold from here?’

  ‘Sold? Why, yes, sir – they’ll have plenty of respectable company, at any rate.’

  But if Alan had guilelessly supposed that the mere signing of a cheque for £33 10s. in settlement of a local printer’s account would finally exile a ghost that now haunted his mind far more persistently than it could ever have haunted Mr Elliott’s green parlour, he soon discovered his mistake. He had kept the photograph, but had long since given up any attempt to find his way through the maze in which he found himself. Why, why, should he concern himself with what an ill-starred life had done to that young face? If the heart, if the very soul is haunted by a ghost, need one heed the frigid dictates of the mind? Infatuated young man, he was in servitude to one who had left the world years before he was born, and had left it, it seemed, only the sweeter by her exit. He was sick for love of one who was once alive but was now dead, and – why should he deny it? Mrs E. wouldn’t! – damned.

  Still, except by way of correspondence he avoided Mr Elliott and his parlour for weeks, until, in fact, the poems were finally in print, until their neat grey deckled paper covers had been stitched on, and the copies were ready for a clamorous public! So it was early one morning in the month of June before he once more found himself in the old bookseller’s quiet annexe. The bush of lilac, stirred by the warm, languid breeze at the window, was shaking free its faded once-fragrant tassels of bloom and tapering heart-shaped leaves from the last dews of night. The young poplars stood like gold-green torches against the blue of the sky. A thrush was singing somewhere out of sight. It was a scene worthy of Arcady.

  Alan had trailed through life without any positive need to call on any latent energy he might possess. And now that he had seen through the press his first essay in publishing a reaction had set in. A cloud of despondency shadowed his young features as he stared out through the glass of the window. Through the weeks gone by he had been assuring himself that it was no more than an act of mere decency to get the poems into print. A vicarious thirty pounds or so, just to quiet his conscience. What reward was even thinkable? And yet but a few nights before he had found himself sitting up in bed in the dark of the small hours just as if there had come a tap upon the panel of his door or a voice had summoned him out of dream. He had sat up, leaning against his bed-rail, exhausted by his few hours’ broken sleep. And in the vacancy of his mind had appeared yet again in silhouette against the dark the living presentment of the young face in the photograph. Merely the image of a face floating there, with waxen downcast lids, the features passive as those of a death-mask – as unembodied an object as the after-image of a flower. There was no speculation in the downcast eyes, and in that lovely, longed-for face; no, nothing whatever for him – and it had faded out as a mirage of green-fronded palm trees and water fades in the lifeless sands of the desert.

  He hadn’t any desire to sleep again that night. Dreams might come; and wakeful questions pestered him. How old was she when the first of the poems was written? How old when no more came, and she herself had gone on – gone on? That barren awful road of disillusionment, satiety, self-disdain. Had she even when young and untroubled ever been happy? Was what she had written even true? How far are poems true? What had really happened? What had been left out? You can’t even tell – yourself – what goes on in the silent places of your mind when you have swallowed, so to
speak, the dreadful outside things of life. What, for example, had Measure for Measure to do with the author of Venus and Adonis, and what Don Juan with Byron as a child? One thing, young women of his own day didn’t take their little affairs like that. They kept life in focus. But that ghost! The ravages, the paint, the insidiousness, the very clothes!

  Coming to that, then, who the devil had he been taking such pains over? The question kept hammering at his mind day after day; it was still unanswered, showed no promise of an answer. And the Arcadian scene beyond the windows suddenly became an irony and a jeer. The unseen bird itself sang on in vulgar mockery: ‘Come off of it! Come off of it! Come off of it! Dolt, dolt, dolt!’

  He turned away out of the brightness of the light, and fixed his eyes on the bulky brown-paper package that contained the printed volumes. It was useless to stay here any longer. He would open the package, but merely to take a look at a copy and assure himself that no ingenuity of the printer had restored any little aberration of spelling or punctuation which he himself had corrected three times in the proofs. He knew the poems – or some of them – by heart now.

  With extreme reluctance he had tried one or two of them on a literary friend: ‘An anonymous thing, you know, I came across it in an old book.’

  The friend had been polite rather than enthusiastic. After, cigarette between fingers, idly listening to a few stanzas, he had smiled and asked Alan if he had ever read a volume entitled Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

  ‘Well, there you are! A disciple of Acton’s, dear boy, if you ask me. Stuff as common as blackberries.’

  And Alan had welcomed the verdict. He didn’t want to share the poems with anybody. If nobody bought them and nobody cared, what matter? All the better. And he wasn’t being sentimental about them now either. He didn’t care if they had any literary value or not. He had entrusted himself with them, and that was the end of the matter. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What?

  And what did it signify that he had less right to the things even than Mrs Elliott – who fortunately was never likely to stake out any claim? The moral ashbins old women can be, he thought bitterly. Simply because this forlorn young creature of the exercise book had been forced at last to make her exit from the world under the tragic but hardly triumphant arch of her own body this old woman had put her hand over her mouth and looked ‘volumes’ at that poor old hen-pecked husband of hers even at mention of her name. Suicides, of course, are a nuisance in any house. But all those years gone by! And what did they know the poor thing had done to merit their insults? He neither knew nor cared, yet for some obscure reason steadily wasted at least five minutes in untying the thick knotted cord of the parcel instead of chopping it up with his pocket-knife in the indignant fashion which he had admired when he visited the printers.

  The chastest little pile of copies was disclosed at last in their grey-blue covers and with their enrichingly rough edges. The hand-made paper had been an afterthought. A further cheque was due to the printer, but Alan begrudged not a farthing. He had even incited them to be expensive. He believed in turning things out nicely – even himself. He and his pretty volumes were ‘a pair’!

  Having opened the parcel, having neatly folded up its prodigal wrappings of brown paper, and thrown away the padding and hanked the string, there was nothing further to do. He sat back in Mr Elliott’s old Windsor chair, leaning his chin on his knuckles. He was waiting, though he didn’t confess it to himself. What he did confess to himself was that he was sick of it all. Age and life’s usage may obscure, cover up, fret away a fellow-creature at least as irrevocably as six feet of common clay.

  When, then, he raised his eyes at some remote inward summons he was already a little hardened in hostility. He was looking clean across the gaily lit room at its other occupant standing there in precisely the same attitude – the high-heeled shoe coquettishly arched on the lowest of the three steps, the ridiculous flaunting hat, the eyes aslant beneath the darkened lids casting back on him their glitter from over a clumsy blur that was perfectly distinct on the cheek-bone in the vivid light of this June morning. And even this one instant’s glimpse clarified and crystallized all his old horror and hatred. He knew that she had seen the tender firstfruits on the table. He knew that he had surprised a gleam of triumph in her snakish features, and he knew that she no more cared for that past self and its literary exercises than she cared for his silly greenhorn tribute to them. What then was she after?

  The darkening, glittering, spectral eyes were once more communicating with him with immense rapidity, and yet were actually conveying about as empty or as mindless a message as eyes can. If half-extinguished fires in a dark room can be said to look coy, these did. But a coyness practised in a face less raddled and ravaged by time than by circumstance is not an engaging quality. ‘Arch!’ My God, ‘arch’ was the word!

  Alan was shivering. How about the ravages that life’s privy paw had made in his own fastidious consciousness? Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously bitter?

  Fortunately his back was turned to the window, and he could in part conceal his face with his hand before this visitor had had time to be fully aware what that face was saying. She had stirred. Her head was trembling slightly on her shoulders. Every tinily exquisite plume in the mauve ostrich feathers on her drooping hat trembled as if in sympathy. Her ringed fingers slipped down from the door to her narrow hip; her painted eyelids narrowed, as if she were about to speak to him. But at this moment there came a sudden flurry of wind in the lilac tree at the window, ravelling its dried-up flowers and silky leaves. She stooped, peered; and then, with a sharp, practised, feline, seductive nod, as bold as grass-green paint, she was gone. An instant or two, and in the last of that dying gust, the door above at the top of the narrow staircase, as if in a sudden access of bravado, violently slammed: ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’

  The impact shook the walls and rattled the windows of the room beneath. It jarred on the listener’s nerves with the force of an imprecation. As abrupt a silence followed. Nauseated and slightly giddy he got up from his chair, resting his fingers automatically on the guileless pile of books, took up his hat, glanced vacantly at the gilded Piccadilly maker’s name on the silk lining, and turned to go. As he did so, a woeful, shuddering fit of remorse swept over him, like a parched-up blast of the sirocco over the sands of a desert. He shot a hasty strangulated look up the narrow empty staircase as he passed by. Then, ‘O God,’ he groaned to himself, ‘I wish – I pray – you poor thing, you could only be a little more at peace – whoever, wherever you are – whatever I am.’

  And then he was with the old bookseller again, and the worldly-wise old man was eyeing him as ingenuously as ever over his steel-rimmed glasses.

  ‘He isn’t looking quite himself,’ he was thinking. ‘Bless me, sir,’ he said aloud, ‘sit down and rest a bit. You must have been overdoing it. You look quite het up.’

  Alan feebly shook his head. His cheek was almost as colourless as the paper on which the poems had been printed; small beads of sweat lined his upper lip and damped his hair. He opened his mouth to reassure the old bookseller, but before he could utter a word they were both of them caught up and staring starkly at one another – like conspirators caught in the act. Their eyes met in glassy surmise. A low, sustained, sullen rumble had come sounding out to them from the remoter parts of the shop which Alan had but a moment before left finally behind him. The whole house shuddered as if at the menace of an earthquake.

  ‘Bless my soul, sir!’ cried the old bookseller. ‘What in merciful heaven was that!’

  He hurried out, and the next instant stood in the entry of his parlour peering in through a dense fog of dust that now obscured the light of the morning. It silted softly down, revealing the innocent cause of the commotion. No irreparable calamity. It was merely that a patch o
f the old cracked plaster ceiling had fallen in, and a mass of rubble and plaster was now piled up, inches high, on the gate-leg table and the chair beside it, while the narrow laths of the ceiling above them, a few of which were splintered, lay exposed like the bones of a skeleton. A thick film of dust had settled over everything, intensifying with its grey veil the habitual hush of the charming little room. And almost at one and the same moment the old bookseller began to speculate first, what damages he might have been called upon to pay if his young customer had not in the nick of time vacated that chair, and next, that though perhaps his own little stock of the rare and the curious would be little the worse for the disaster, Alan’s venture might be very much so. Indeed, the few that were visible of the little pile of books – but that morning come virgin and speckless from the hands of the binders – were bruised and scattered. And as Mr Elliott eyed them, his conscience smote him: ‘Softly now, softly,’ he muttered to himself, ‘or we shall have Mrs E. down on this in pretty nearly no time!’

  But Mrs E. had not heard. No footfall sounded above; nothing stirred; all remained as it might be expected to remain. And Alan, who meanwhile had stayed motionless in the outer shop, at this moment joined the old bookseller, and looked in on the ruins.

  ‘Well, there, sir,’ Mr Elliott solemnly assured him, ‘all I can say is, it’s a mercy you had come out of it. And by no more than a hair’s-breadth!’

  But Alan made no answer. His mind was a void. He was listening again – and so intently that it might be supposed the faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen might reach his ear. It was too late now – and in any case it hadn’t occurred to him – to add to the title-page of his volume that well-worn legend: ‘The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.’ But it might at least have served for his own brief apologia. He had meant well – it would have suggested. You never can tell.