Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘You really are,’ whispered Lettie, with a swift glance round in quest of trespassing stewards, ‘you really are rather a dear, you poor thing, and I believe I love you best when you are most like a fat little boy that couldn’t say boh to a cockroach. George dear, look at me. Do try and be a little confident. You know – and wouldn’t you just rap it out at anybody who denied it! – you know perfectly well that you could take on even that old President’s job tomorrow morning without a moment’s hesitation – as soon, that is, as you had recovered from dying of fright overnight. And yet! …’

  She slid her slender cold hand under the tablecloth and clasped his right one that lay flaccid and inert upon his knee.

  ‘Besides, haven’t you me, you old silly? Would I have said, Go, or rather Come, all this marvellous long way across the sea, if I hadn’t been absolutely certain it was Set Fair? Would I? Would I be unendurably pining to kiss you now – if only we weren’t here – would I?’

  George – his fingers still trembling a little, for three solid days of queasy seasickness does take it out of a man even with the stubbornest of constitutions – removed his gold glasses, and turned his placid anxious faithful affectionate hazel eyes on Lettie’s, as she sat there, their hands clasped under the tablecloth. But out of the corner of one of them he had at that very moment spotted a steward, nimbly stepping on his way in their direction, and what he huskily said was, ‘Any cereal, Lettie?’

  * As printed in The Picnic and Other Stories (1941). First published in Yale Review, September 1929.

  Physic*

  Emilia and William had been keeping one another company in the kitchen. Mary, her trusty substantial cook-general was ‘out’, and would not be knocking at the door until half-past ten. After that there might be another hour to wait. But then Emilia would be alone. Meanwhile, just like man and wife, William and she would soon be having supper together at two corners of the kitchen table, and William would have an egg – with nine bread-and-butter fingers.

  This, once fortnightly, now weekly, Wednesday-night feast had become a kind of ritual, a little secret institution. They called it their covey night. Not even Daddie ever shared it with them; and it was astonishing what mature grown-up company William became on these occasions. It was as if, entirely unknown to himself, he had swallowed one of Jack’s bean-seeds and had turned inside into a sort of sagacious second-husband. All that Emilia had to do, then, was merely to become again the child she used to be. And that of course needs only a happy heart.

  He was a little dark-skinned boy, William – small for his age. A fringe of gilt-edged fair hair thatched a narrow forehead over his small, restless eyes. His sister Sallie – poor gaunt Aunt Sarah, whom she had been called after, having departed this life when less than a month had passed since the gay christening party – little Sallie, after a restless and peevish afternoon and a wailful bath, was asleep now, upstairs, in her crib. You could tell that almost without having to creep out every now and again to listen at the foot of the stairs.

  William had been even more lively and hoppity than usual. He and Emilia had been playing Beggar-my-Neighbour, and he had become steadily more excited when with something very like sheer magic, every sly knave in the pack had rapidly abandoned poor Emilia and managed to slide into his hand. And when – after an excited argument as to where the Queen of Hearts had best be hidden – they changed the game, he laughed and laughed till the tears came into his eyes to see her utter confusion at finding herself for the third time an abject Old Maid! And when supper-time came – plates, spoons, forks – he had all but danced from dresser to table, from table to dresser again. They had borrowed Mary’s best blue-check kitchen tablecloth; he had said it looked cooler. Don’t you think so, Mummie?’ And every now and again he had ejaculated crisp shrill remarks and directions at Emilia, who was looking after the cooking in the outer room, a room she had steadfastly refused to call the ‘scullery’. Merely because she disliked the word! Though one day in a sudden moment of inspiration she had defended his priggishness by exclaiming, ‘Well, spell it with a k and then see what you think of it!’

  It was a little way Emilia had. As tenaciously as she could she always put off until tomorrow even what it was merely difficult to put up with today. Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, was her motto when driven into a corner. She hated problems, crises, the least shadow of any horror, though they would sometimes peer up at her out of her mind – and from elsewhere – when she wasn’t looking, like animals at evening in the darkening hills. But when they actually neared, and had to be faced; well, that was quite another matter.

  For some minutes now, busied over her sizzling pan at the gas stove, she hadn’t noticed that William’s galvanic sprightly conversation piped up from the kitchen had been steadily dwindling, had almost ceased. He had decided to have his supper egg fried, though ‘lightly boiled’ was the institution. And Emilia had laughed when, after long debate, he had declared that he had chosen it fried because then it was more indigestible. She was dishing it up from the smoke and splutter – a setting sun on a field of snow, and with a most delicate edging of scorch.

  When she came back into the kitchen William was standing by the table, gazing across it at the window. He couldn’t be looking out of the window, for although there was a crevice a few inches wide between the flowered chintz curtains that had been drawn over it and where the blue linen blind had not been pulled down to the very bottom, it was already pitch dark outside. Yet even at this distance she saw that he couldn’t also be staring solely at his own reflection.

  He stood motionless, his eyes fixed on this dark glassy patch of window, his head well above the table now. He had not even turned at sound of her footsteps. So far as Emilia’s birdlike heart was concerned it was as if a jay had screeched in a spinney. But best not to notice too much. Don’t put things into people’s heads. ‘There!’ she exclaimed, ‘Well now, you have cut the bread and butter thick, Mr Stoic! I’m going to have that scrap of cold fish. Eat this while it’s hot, my precious!’

  But William had continued to wait.

  ‘I don’t think, Mummie,’ he said, slowly as if he were reciting something he had been learning by heart, ‘I don’t think I’ll have my egg after all. I don’t think I feel very hungry just now.’

  All his eagerness and excitement seemed to have died down into this solemn and stagnant reverie; and for a child to have the air and appearance of a sorrowful old dwarf is unutterably far away from its deliciously pretending to be a sedate grown-up.

  ‘Not to have it!’ cried Emilia. ‘Why, look, blessing, it’s cooked! Look! Lovely. You wouldn’t know it wasn’t a tiny half of a peach in cream. Let’s pretend.’

  ‘I couldn’t like even that, Mummie,’ he said, glancing at it, a slight shudder ending in a decisive shake of the head as he hastily looked away again. ‘I don’t think, you know, I want any supper.’

  Emilia’s eyes widened. She stood perfectly still a moment, the hot plate in her hand, staring at him. Then she hurriedly put it down on the table, knelt with incredible quickness beside him, and seized his hand.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ she said. ‘You don’t feel very well, William. You don’t feel very well? Your hands are hot. Not sick? Not sore throat? Tell Mummie.’

  ‘I’m not ill,’ wailed William obstinately. ‘Just because I don’t want the egg! You can’t like that horrid cold fish, and if I did feel sick, wouldn’t I say so? That’s only what you say.’ He paused as if the utmost caution and precision were imperative, then added, nodding his head mournfully and sympathetically in time to the whispered words, ‘I have got a teeny tiny headache, but I didn’t notice it until just now.’ His mouth opened in a prodigious yawn, leaving tears in his eyes. ‘Isn’t it funny, Mummie – you can’t really see anything out of the window when it’s black like that, yet you needn’t look at yourself in the glass. It’s just as if …’

  His eyes came round from examining the window, and fixed themselves on her
face.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ said Emilia, raising herself abruptly from the floor. ‘That’s what it is.’ She kept squeezing the thin, unresponsive fingers of his hand between her own. ‘You’re feverish. And I knew it. All the time. Yes – how stupid of me.’ And instantly her voice had changed, all vain self-recriminations gone. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, William. First, I’ll fill a hot-water bottle. Then I’ll run up and get the thermometer. And you shall be the doctor. That’s much the best thing.’ And she did not even pause for his consent.

  ‘I expect you know, Dr Wilson,’ she had begun at once, ‘it’s something that’s disagreed with my little boy. I expect so. Oh, yes, I expect so.’

  William, pale and attentive, was faltering. ‘Well, yes, Mrs Hadleigh, p’raps,’ he said at last, as if his mouth were cram-full of plums. ‘You may be right. And that depends, you know, on what he has been eating.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I quite understand, doctor. Then would you perhaps wait here just for one moment, while I see if my little boy is ready for you. I think, you know, he might like to wash his hands first and brush his hair. And pray keep on your overcoat in case you should feel cold.’ She took a large dry Turkey towel that was airing on a horse near by, and draped it over William’s shoulders. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she assured him. ‘Not a moment.’

  Yet she paused to glance again at his shawled-in pale face and fever-bright eyes, as if by mere looking she could bore clean through his body; and stooping once more, she pressed her cheek against his, and then his hand to her lips.

  ‘You said,’ half tearfully chanted the little boy, ‘that I was the doctor; and now you are kissing me, Mummie!’

  ‘Well, I could often and often kiss lots of doctors,’ said his mother, and in a flash she was gone, leaving him alone. She raced up the dark staircase as if she were pursued by twenty demons, not even waiting to switch on the light. And when she came to her bedroom it was as if everything in it were doing its utmost to reassure her. The shining of the street lamp was quietly dappling its walls with shadow. The whole room lay oceans deep in silence; the duskily mounded bed, the glass over the chimneypiece, the glass on the dressing-table. They may until that very moment have been conferring together, but now had, as usual, instantly fallen mute, their profound confabulations for the time being over. But she did not pause even so much as to sip of this refreshing stillness. Her finger touched the electric switch, and in an instant the harmless velvety shadows – frail quivering leaf-shadows – the peace, the serenity, had clean evaporated. It was as if the silence had been stricken with leprosy, so instantaneous was the unnatural glare – even in spite of the rose-pink lamp-shades. For now Emilia was staring indeed.

  How, she was asking herself, how by any possibility could that striped school tie of her husband’s have escaped from its upper drawer on to the bedspread? How by an utter miracle had she failed to see it when she had carried Sallie into the room only an hour or two ago? Ties don’t wriggle out of top-drawers across carpets and climb up valances like serpents in the tropics. Husbands miles away cannot charm such things into antics like these!

  Mary had been out all the afternoon. She herself had been out for most of it with the children, and she could have vowed, taken her oath, knew, that that couldn’t have been there when she had come up to put on her hat. In the instant that followed, before even she could insist on raising her eyes from this queer scrap of ‘evidence’, her mind suddenly discovered that it was dazed and in the utmost confusion. It was as if, like visitors to a gaudy Soho restaurant, a jostling crowd of thoughts and images, recollections, doubts, memories, clues, forebodings, apprehensions and reiterated stubborn reassurances had thronged noisy and jostling into consciousness – and then were gone again. And at that, at once, as if by instinct and as unforeseeably as a night moth alights on one out of a multitude of flowers, her stricken glance had encountered her husband’s note.

  At sight of it her heart had leapt in her body, and then cowered down like a thing smitten with palsy. Novels told you of things like these, but surely not just ordinary life! The note had been scribbled on a half-sheet of her own notepaper, and hastily folded into a cocked hat – perhaps the only old-fashioned device she had ever known that husband to be capable of. It seemed that she had learned by heart the message it contained before even she had unfolded the paper and read it. Indeed, it did not matter what it had to say. It hardly even mattered how it had said it. So considerately, yet so clumsily, so blastingly. ‘She’ – that alone was enough. When shells explode why be concerned with fuse or packing? Edward was gone. That was all that mattered. She had been abandoned – she and the children.

  So far, so inevitably. You can in vile moments of suspicion, incredulity and terror foresee things like that. Just that he was gone – and for good. But to have come stealing back in the afternoon into a vacant house, merely for a few clothes or a little money, and she out, and Mary out, and the children out – and everything else out; well, that seemed a funny, an unnecessary thing to do!

  ‘I wouldn’t have so much minded …’ she began to mutter to herself, and then realized that her body was minding far too much. A thin acid water had welled into her mouth. Unlike William, she felt sick and dizzy. She had gone stiff and cold and goose-flesh all over. It was as if some fiendish hand were clutching her back hair and dragging the scalp from her forehead taut as the parchment of a drum over her eyes. It was as if she had swallowed unwittingly a dose of some filthy physic. Her knees trembled. Her hands hung down from her arms as though they were useless. And the only thing she could see at this instant was the other woman’s face. But it wasn’t looking at her; on purpose. It was turned all but three-quarters away – a be coming angle for the long, fair cheekbone, the drooping eyelashes, the lips, the rounded chin Clara. And then, suddenly, she saw them both together, stooping a little; at a railway station, it seemed; talking close. Or was it that they had just got out of a cab?

  Emilia might as well have been dreaming all this, since although these picturings, this misery, this revulsion of jealousy, and the horror of what was to come persisted in a hideous activity somewhere in her mind, she herself had refused for the time being to have anything to do with it. There was something infinitely more important that must be done at once, without a moment’s delay. Husbands may go, love turn, the future slip into ruin as silently and irretrievably as a house of cards. But children must not be kept waiting; not sick children. She was already clumsily tugging at the tiny middle drawer of the old mirror, one of their first bargains, on the dressing-table, and she caught at the same instant a glimpse of the face reflected in its glass; but so instantaneously that the eyes of the image appeared to be darkened and shut, and therefore blind.

  What a boon a little methodicalness may be. What a mercy that in this world things stay where they are put; do not hide, deceive, play false, forsake and abandon us. Where she always kept it, there lay the slim, metal, sharp-edged case of the thermometer. It was as if it had been faithfully awaiting this very reunion – ever since she had seen it last. In the old days, before she was married and had children, even if she had possessed such a thing, she might have looked for it for hours before discovering it. She had despised thermometers. Now, such a search would have resembled insanity.

  She hesitated for scarcely the breadth of a sigh at the door, and then with decision switched off the light. Stuffing her husband’s scribbled note into her apron pocket, she flew into the next room, put a match to the fire laid in the grate, pushed the hot-water bottle between the sheets of the bed, and hastened downstairs. Her legs, her body, her hand flitting over the banisters, were as light and sure again as if she had never experienced so much as an hour even of mere disappointment in her life. Besides, for some little time now, that body had been habitually told what it had to do. And so long as her orders came promptly and concisely, it could be trusted to continue to act in the same fashion, to be instantly obedient. That was what being a mother taught you to
become, and even taught you to try within limits to teach a young child to become – an animated automaton.

  ‘Dr Wilson’ stood where she had left him beside the table and in precisely the same attitude. He had not even troubled to sit down. He had, apparently, not even so much as moved his eyes.

  ‘Now, doctor,’ said Emilia.

  At this, those eyes first settled on her fingers, then quietly shifted to her face.

  ‘You were a long time gone, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he remonstrated in a drawling voice, as if his tongue were sticking to the roof of his mouth. ‘A very long time.’ He took the thermometer and pushed it gingerly between his lips, shutting them firmly over the thin glass stem. Then his blue and solemn eyes became fixed again, and, without the faintest stir, he continued to watch his mother, while she in turn watched him. When half a minute had gone by, he lifted his eyebrows. She shook her head. In another half-minute he himself took the thermometer out of his mouth, and, holding it between finger and thumb, gravely scrutinized it under the light. ‘A hundred and forty-seven,’ he announced solemnly. ‘H’m.’ Then he smiled, a half-secret, half-deprecatory smile. ‘That’s nothing to worry about, Mrs Hadleigh. Nothing at all. It looks to me as if all you did was to worry. Put him to bed; I will send him round a bottle of very nice medicine – very nice medicine. And …’ his voice fell a little fainter, ‘I’ll look in again in the morning.’

  His eyes had become fixed once more, focused, it seemed, on the faraway. ‘Mummie, I do wish when Mary pulls down the blinds she would do it to the very bottom. I hate seeing – seeing myself in the glass.’

  But Emilia had not really attended to this fretful and unreasonable complaint. She herself was now examining the thermometer. She was frowning, adjusting it, frowning again. Then she had said something – half-muttered, half-whispered – which Dr Wilson had failed to catch.