Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘How did you do it?’ said the boy, looking up and leaning back, with a shuddering sigh, upon his heels. ‘How on earth? Did he struggle? He couldn’t have struggled much, I suppose. He’s so small. He looks so small.’

  The questions were unanswered and were unrepeated. He was merely drinking the scene in. That mole upon the bluish close-shaven cheek was certainly grown blacker than it had been in life, more conspicuous.

  ‘But you aren’t of course going to leave him like this?’ he broke out sharply. ‘You can’t, you know; you simply can’t.’ But the woman was paying him no attention. ‘Don’t you see? They’d find it out in no time,’ he added petulantly.

  Yet even in the midst of this callous analysis, the woman’s childlike attitude attracted his sympathy. At sight of the mute huddled contents of the cupboard, she seemed to have forgotten the danger she was in. A vacant immeasurable mournfulness quietened her face. She was crying. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s no good crying,’ he went on, still kneeling on the cold oilcloth. ‘That won’t be of any help; and I’d be awfully pleased to help you all I can. As a matter of fact I didn’t much care for old Jacobs myself. But then, he’s dead now. He is dead?’

  The woman smothered his momentary fear with an eye-shot of horror. ‘Well, if he is, I can’t see why you shouldn’t say so.’ She remained motionless. ‘Oh, dear,’ he muttered impatiently, ‘don’t you understand? We must do something.’ A heavy frown had settled under the streak of dark hair on his forehead. ‘You wouldn’t stand the ghost of a chance as it is. They’d catch you easy.’

  The woman nodded. ‘I don’t care; I hope they will. I don’t care what happens now – because I can’t think.’

  ‘That’s all rot,’ said the boy stoutly. ‘You’ve got to.’

  The woman was irritating and paradoxical in this mood, and more than ever like a senseless wax model, which, with diabolical tremors, moves its glazed eyes and turns a glossy head. He peered again into the cupboard. Only once before had he seen Jacobs asleep – stretched out on a sofa in the dining-room one sultry afternoon in the streaming sunshine – gaping, sonorous. Then he had gone out as he had come in, on tiptoe. Now he stooped a little closer towards the cupboard, examining what was in it, stretching out even an experimental finger towards the small pallid hand.

  He compared the woman’s face and this other face, and found a fancy strangely contradictory of the facts. Jacobs was really and truly the man of blood; Jacobs was just the kind of person you’d expect to be a murderer. Not this woman, so fat and stupid. Nobody would be surprised to find her body in any cupboard. But Jacobs, small and ferrety, softly rasping his tune between his teeth, on and on. And now Jacobs was dead. So that’s what that was like. He jerked his head aside, and his eyes became fixed once more on the gallipot. That was the real and eloquent thing. His mind had completed its circuit. He stood up convinced.

  ‘It’s no good going on like this,’ he explained lucidly, almost cheerfully. ‘This would be the very first place they would look into. I should look in here myself. But don’t you see, you needn’t be caught at all if you do what I tell you. It’s something I read in a book of mine.’

  The woman lifted a mechanical head and looked at him; and as if for the first time. She saw – a meagre boy with linnet legs and narrow shoulders, a lean clean-cut face of a rather bilious brown, and straight dark brown hair beneath a yachting cap; a boy in black stockings, a night-shirt and a shiny belt; his dark eyes, narrowed and intent, set steep in his head. This boy frightened her. She pushed on her bonnet and loosened her dress about her throat.

  Manifestly she was preparing to go. He spoke more decisively. ‘You don’t see. That’s all,’ he said. ‘Really, on my word of honour, it would be all right. I’m not just saying so. A baby could do it.’

  The woman knelt down beside him in a posture not unlike the inmate’s of the cupboard, and solemnly stared into his face. ‘Tell me, tell me quick, you silly lamb. What did you say? A baby could do it?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said the boy, outwardly cool, but inwardly ardent, ‘it’s as easy as A.B.C. You get a rope and make a noose, and you put it over his head and round his neck, you know, just as if he was going to be hanged. And then you hang him up on a nail or something. He mustn’t touch the ground, of course. You throttled him, didn’t you? You see there’s no blood. They’ll say he hanged himself, don’t you see? They’d find old Jacobs strung up in the kitchen here and they’ll say he’s hanged himself. Don’t you see?’ he repeated.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do it,’ she whimpered, ‘not for worlds. I couldn’t. I’d sooner stay here beside him till they come.’ She began to sob in a stupid vacant fashion and then suddenly hiccuped.

  ‘You could, I tell you. A baby could do it. You’re afraid. That’s what it is! I’m going to, I tell you: whether you like it or not.’ He stamped his stockinged foot. ‘Mind you, I’m not doing it for myself. It’s nothing to do with me. You aren’t taking the least trouble to understand.’ He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe any human being could by any possibility be so dense. ‘It’s just stupid,’ he added over his shoulder, as he sallied out to the boot cupboard to fetch a rope.

  Once more the tide of consciousness flowed in the woman’s stolid, flattened brain. Two or three words of this young hero had at last fallen on good ground. And with consciousness, fear had come back. She came waddling after the boy. The vagrant crawling inmates of the cupboard had been swept carelessly from the corner, and now he was trailing a rope behind him as he went on into the larder for brandy. His match died down meanwhile, scorching his fingers, and he stayed on in the dark, the woman close behind him, rummaging gingerly among the bottles and dishes. And soon his finger-tips touched the sharp-cut stopper. He returned triumphant, flipping from them the custard they had encountered in their search. The woman followed close behind him, stumbling ever and again upon his trailing rope, and thereby adding to her fears and docility. She was coming alive again. Brandy set her tongue gabbling faster. It gave the boy the strength and zeal of a stage villain.

  He skipped hither and thither, now on to, now off the kitchen chair he had pushed nearer; then – having swept back the array of pink-smeared silver candlesticks and snuffers that were in his way, he scrambled up on to the table, and presently, after a few lasso-like flings of it, he had run the rope and made it fast over one of a few large hooks that curved down from the ceiling, hooks once used, as Jacobs had told him, to hang up hams on. His mouth was set, his face intent; his soldier grandfather’s lower lip drawn in under the upper. The more active he was the more completely he became master of the ceremonies, the woman only an insignificant accomplice, as stupid as she was irresponsible. Even while she helped him drag out the body from the cupboard on to the flat arena of oilcloth, she continued to cry and snivel, as if that would be of any help. But a keen impassive will compelled her obedience. She followed the boy’s every nod.

  And presently she almost forgot the horror of the task, and found a partial oblivion in the intensity of it, though the boy was displeased by her maunderings. They were merely a doleful refrain to his troublesome grisly work. But he uttered no open reproof – not even when she buried her face in the baize apron and embraced the knees of the dead man. Only once she made any complaint against the limp heedless hung-up creature. ‘If only,’ she assured her young accomplice, ‘if only he hadn’t gone and said as how I wasn’t the first. I ask you! As if I didn’t know it.’ But to this he paid no attention.

  And now, at last, he drew back to view his handiwork. This he did with an inscrutable face, a face flattered at his own extraordinary ingenuity, a young face, almost angelic in its rapt gaslit look and yet one, maybe, of unsophisticated infamy. The dwarfish body seemed to be dangling naturally enough from its hook in the ceiling, its heels just free of the chair. And it did to some extent resemble the half-sinister, half-jocular cut that adorned his Calendar. Yet somehow he wasn’t perfectly satisfied. Somehow the consummation was as yet incomplete. Some
one thing was wanting, some blemish spoiled the effect and robbed it of unity. What? He stood hunting for it without success.

  He followed the woman into the passage. She walked unsteadily, swaying bulkily to and fro, now and again violently colliding with the wall. ‘Oh, it was crule, crule,’ she was muttering.

  After her stalked the boy, deep in thought. When she stopped, he stopped; when once more she set forward, as patiently he too set forward with her. Which of them was led, and which leader, it would be difficult to say. This dogged search after the one thing wanting continued to perplex and evade him. He decided that it was no good trying. It must be looked to when the woman was gone; when he was alone.

  ‘I think you had better go now,’ he said. ‘He’ll be coming home soon – my father, I mean, and … It’s just ten to twelve by Jacobs’s clock.’ The words conjured up in his mind a vision of his handsome dressed-up stepmother, standing there in the kitchen doorway half-hysterical before her swaying manservant. It faintly, and even a little sadly, tickled his fancy.

  He opened the front door. It was still raining, and the smell of the damp earth and ivy leaves came washing into the house. The woman squatted down on the doorstep. ‘Where shall I go?’ she said. ‘Where shall I go? What’s the use? There ain’t nowhere.’ The boy scowled at the dripping trees. The house was surrounded by night – empty and silent but for the smothering soft small whisper of the rain, and the flat drip, drip of the drops from the porch.

  ‘What’s the use? There ain’t nowhere,’ again wailed his poor bedraggled confederate. He scrutinized her scornfully from under his tilted yachting cap. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. He raced at full speed up the three dark flights of stairs to his bedroom. The book, the mouse-nibbled pie-crust were tossed on to the hearthrug and a florin was dug out of the gritty soot. Down he came again pell-mell.

  Like a cat venturing into a busy street, the woman now stood peering out from the last of the three shallow crescent-shaped stone steps under the porch. ‘I’ve brought you this,’ he said superciliously.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the woman.

  She paused yet again, looking at him, in an attitude now familiar to the boy – the fingers of her knuckled left hand, with its thick brassy wedding-ring, pressed closely against mouth and cheek. He wondered for a moment what she was thinking about, and he was still wondering when she stepped finally off out into the rain.

  A shrill shout followed her. ‘I say! Mind that ditch there in the road!’ But the only result of this was to bring the woman back again; she knelt and clasped him tightly to her bosom.

  ‘I don’t know why or anything. Oh, my lamb, my lamb, I didn’t mean to do it and now I haven’t got anywhere to go.’ She bent low and hid her distorted miserable face on his shoulder. ‘Oh, oh, I miss him so. The Lord God keep you safe! You’ve been very kind to me. But …’

  She released him, and waddled out once more under the flat-spread branches of the cedar tree, while the boy rubbed the smarting tears from his neck. He shut the door indignantly. This tame reaction was mawkish and silly. Then he paused, uncertain what to do next. And suddenly memory rendered up the one thing wanting – the master-touch.

  Why, of course, of course! Jacobs must have kicked a chair down. You couldn’t hang yourself like that without a drop. It was impossible. The boy’s valour, after all, was only a little shaken by the embrace. Into the kitchen he walked victorious. The gas was still singing, as it had sung all the evening, shedding its dismal flaring light on wall and clock and blind and ceiling and wide array of glossy crockery. The puckered clay-coloured face looked stupidly at him with bolting, dull, dull-lidded eyes. What was now to be done must be done quickly. He ducked sharply and upset the chair – a little too sharply, for a light spring-side boot had tapped him on the cheek. He leapt back, hot and panting. The effect was masterly. It was a triumph. And yet … He stared, with clenched fists, and whispered over his shoulder to a now absent accomplice. But no, he was alone! Only Jacobs was there – with that drowsy slit of eye – tremulously dangling. And as if, even for him, as if even for his clear bold young spirit, this last repulsive spectacle, that last minute assault of a helpless enemy, overwhelming some secret stronghold in his mind, had suddenly proved intolerable, his energy, enterprise, courage wilted within him. The whisper in the dark outside of the uncertain wind, the soft bubbling whistle of the gas, the thousand and one minute dumb things around him in the familiar kitchen – nothing had changed. Yet now every object had become suddenly real, stark, menacing, and hostile. Panic seized him. He ran out to the front door and bawled into the dark after the woman.

  No answer came. The rain was falling softly on the sodden turf; and here, beneath the porch, in large ponderous drops. The widespread palms of the cedar tree under the clouded midnight lay prone and motionless. The whole world was gone out – black. Nothing, nothing; he was alone.

  He ran back again into the house – as if he had been awakened out of a dream – leaving the door agape behind him, and whimpering ‘Mother!’ Then louder – louder. And all the blind things of the house took wooden voices. So up and down this white-shirted raider ran, his clumsy poniard clapping against sudden corners, his tongue calling in vain, and at last – as he went scuttling upstairs at sound of cab-horse and wheels upon the sodden gravel – falling dumb for very terror of its own noise.

  * As printed in BS (194z). First published in Monthly Review, June 1905.

  THE WIND BLOWS OVER (1936)

  ‘What Dreams May Come’*

  Emmeline did not know what had happened to her, but at once supposed she had been asleep. Her body gently swaying and rocking in passive obedience to the almost soundless motion of the coach, she gazed out blankly into the window glass, cold and lustrous as a frozen pool in some outlandish and benighted valley. Vaguely reflected there, she scanned her pale and solemn face – ‘a nice tidy face’, as a friend had once summarized it – wide brows, high-boned oval cheeks, a firm, quiet mouth, and these now darkly questing, searching, startled eyes. No answer to any question there. She turned towards the hunched-up shape of the driver seated in his glass cab; and continued awhile to survey the great hump of his shoulders and sprawling arms as if through a faint inward mist. He sat crouched together, his hands seemingly clasped on the steering wheel, his high-angled coat-collar helmeting a motionless head.

  No wonder he was cold! A jagged hole gaped in his glass screen like a huge black star. This was no surprise, yet it filled her with perplexity. What was wrong? Surely the blazing light had dismally dimmed in the bulbs over her head? And how came it that she was alone now in the strange vacancy of the coach – a vacancy faint with fumes to which she herself could give no name? Fumes familiar enough, but not of petrol – sweeter, more nebulous, dangerous, affrighting. Alone! Why, but an instant before, that faint image of herself had been smiling at another reflection beside it in this very glass! Her glance came to rest at last on the angle of the seat on which she was sitting, and there it stayed. What inconceivable, sudden and violent wrench could have twisted sidelong like that its heavy metal framework?

  It must have been raining, too, while she slept – and slept through this! Raining heavily, if so; the dark stain on the thick grey fabric of the seat had soaked it through. She put out a tentative finger but refrained from touching it; then craned round her head in search of the conductor. The wreathing mist which dimmed her eyes obscured him too a little; but there he was, huddled and stooping forward on the backmost seat of all, elbows on knees, his face cupped in his hands, his eyes, it appeared, fixed on the floor. He might so have sat for ages, like a wax image immured in a museum, like Rodin’s Le Penseur. Nevertheless of the immediate past the sight of him had recalled not a vestige.

  Where had she come from? Where was she going to? Her mind was in a terrifying confusion. Apart from this deadly lethargy as of a profound and leaden slumber, she felt no pain, no discomfort even. The grey suede handbag beneath her clasped, gloved hands still lay in her lap.
This she had instantly recognized. It was brand-new; it had been a gift. But when? From whom? Tears, it seemed, had begun forlornly rolling down her cheeks from out of her eyes. She opened the bag, fumbling hastily through its familiar contents, and found among them a scrap of paper – the remains of a broken envelope, scribbled over with what appeared to be a singularly eccentric handwriting.

  This object, surely, she had never seen before, and yet in its dinginess, in its extreme familiarity, it seemed now far more actual than the rest. She stooped, gazing at it, then lifting it into the dingy light endeavoured in vain to read what it said. The divisions between the words, the words themselves, arranged like those of an address, even the ridiculously prolonged loops of the letters – all this was clear enough, and yet she could decipher not a single syllable. A misery of misgiving swept over her; what dreadful fate had overtaken her? What next?

  The cumbrous vehicle swayed stolidly on, its hidden engine throbbing hardly more audibly then if it were within her own breast. It was country here – bare, high tangled trees to the left, skirting the road which glimmered on in front of her into the faint vague starlight; fields fading out obscurely on the right. She was lost – all memory gone. What next? And yet again those dark reflected panic-stricken eyes in the glass encountered her own; vividly, senselessly pleading for an answer.