Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘I’d give him,’ he again began wearily, ‘some rice pudding and lemonade, and —’ But before the rest of his counsel could be uttered she had wrapped him tighter in his bath towel, had stooped down to him back to front so that he could clasp his hands round her neck, pick-a-back; and next moment he was being whisked up the dark staircase to the blue and white nursery. There she slid him gently down beside the fender, took off his shoes, smoothed his fringe, and tenderly kissed him.

  ‘You have very bright eyes, Dr Wilson. You mustn’t let them get too bright – just for my sake.’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he parroted, and then suddenly his whole body began to shiver.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘now just begin to take off your clothes, my own precious, while I see to the fire – though that, Dr Wilson, should have been done first. Look, the silly paper has just flared up and gone out. But it won’t be a minute. The sticks are as dry as Guy Fawkes’ Day. Soon cosy in bed now.’

  William with unusually stupid fingers was endeavouring to undo his buttons. He was already tired of being the doctor. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘do your teeth chatter, Mummie, when you are very hot? That seems funny. And why do faces come in the window, horrid faces? Is that blind right down to the very bottom? Because I would like it to be. Oh dear, my head does ache, Mummie.’

  It was extraordinary with what cleverness and dexterity Emilia’s hands, unlike her son’s, were now doing as they were bidden. The fire, coaxed by a little puffing in lieu of bellows, in a wondrous sheet of yellow, like crocuses, was now sweeping up the chimney as if to devour the universe. A loose under-blanket had been thrust into the bed, the hot bottle wrapped up in a fleecy old shawl, the coal scuttle had been filled, a second pair of small pyjamas had been hung over the fender to air, a saucepan of milk had been stood on the stove with its gas turned low – like a circlet of little blue wavering beads; and William himself, half-naked for less than the fraction of a second, had been tucked up in his bed, one of her own tiny embroidered handkerchiefs sprinkled with lavender water for company. There, he had instantly fallen asleep, though spasmodic jerks of foot and hand, and flickering eyelids showed that his small troubles had not wholly been left behind him.

  So swiftly and mechanically had her activities followed one upon the other that Emilia had only just realized that she was still unable to make up her mind whether to telephone at once to the doctor or to venture – to dare – to look in on Sallie.

  Blind fool! Blind fool! – foreseeing plainly every open or half-hidden hint and threat of tonight’s event, smelling it, tasting it, hearing it again and again knocking at the door of her mind, she had yet continually deferred the appalling moment when she must meet it face to face, challenge and be done with it, and accept its consequences. The mere image in her mind of her husband’s school tie left abandoned on the bed had made the foreboding of looking at Sallie a last and all but insupportable straw. The futility, the cowardice! What needs most daring must be done instantly. There had not been the least need to debate such a question. You can’t do twenty-one things at once!

  Having stolen another prolonged scrutiny of William’s pale dream-distorted face and dilating nostrils, she hastened into her own bedroom again, groped for the tiny switch-pull that dangled by the bed-rail, stooped over the cot beside it, and, screening its inmate’s face as much as possible from the glare, looked down and in. The small blonde creature, lovelier and even more delicate to the eye than any flower, had kicked off all its bedclothes, the bright lips were ajar, the cheeks flushed – an exquisite coral red. And the body was breathing almost as fast and shallowly as a cat’s. That children under three years old should talk in their sleep, yes; but with so minute a vocabulary! Still, all vocabularies are minute for what they are sometimes needed to express – or to keep silent about.

  No sickness, no sore throat; but headache, lassitude, pains all over the body, shivering attacks and fever – you just added up the yeses and subtracted the noes; and influenza, or worse, was the obvious answer. Should she or should she not wheel the cot into William’s room? Sallie might wake, and wake William. Whereas if she remained here and she herself lay down in the night even for so much as an hour – and began to think, she wouldn’t be alone, not hopelessly alone. It was the fear of waking either patient that decided the question. She very gently drew blanket and counterpane over Sallie’s nakedness, draped a silk handkerchief over the rose-coloured shade, switched on the electric stove in the fireplace, and ran downstairs. There for a few moments, eyes restlessly glancing, she faced the stark dumbness and blindness of the mouthpiece of the telephone.

  Dr Wilson was in. Thank heaven for that. Incredible, that was his voice! There might have been a maternity case – hours and hours. He might have had a horde of dispensary patients. But no, he would be round in a few minutes. Thank heaven for that. She put back the receiver with a shuddering sigh of gratitude. All that was now needed – superhuman ordeal – was just to wait.

  But this Emilia was to be spared. For midway up the staircase, whose treads now seemed at least twice their usual height, she had suddenly paused. Fingers clutching the banister rail, she stood arrested, stock still, icy, constricted. The garden gate had faintly clicked. There could be only one explanation of that – at least on a Wednesday. Edward’s few friends and cronies, every one of them, must have discovered long ago that Wednesdays were now his ‘evenings out’. And she – she hadn’t much fancied friends or company recently. It was he himself, then. He had come back. What to do now? A ghastly revulsion took possession of her, a gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach, another kind of nausea, another kind, even, of palpitation.

  If only she could snatch a few minutes to regain her balance, to prepare herself to be alone. Consciousness was like the scene of a fair – a dream-fair, all distortion, glare, noise, diablerie and confusion. And before she was even aware of her decision – to make use of a deceit, a blind, a mere best-thing-for-the-time-being – she had found herself in her bedroom again, had somehow with cold and fumbling fingers folded the note into its pretty cocked-hat shape again, and replaced it where she had first set eyes on it, beside the charming little travelling clock, the gift of Aunt Sarah, in the middle of the mantelpiece.

  What light remained in the room behind the blinded and curtained windows could not possibly have been detectable outside. That was certain. In an instant she was in William’s room once more – listening, her heart beating against her ribs like the menacing thumping of a drum. She had not long to wait. The latch of the front door had faintly squeaked, the lower edge of the door itself had scraped very gently across the coarse mat within, had as softly and furtively shut.

  ‘Is that you, Edward?’ she heard herself very gently and insidiously calling over the banisters from the landing. ‘How lovely! You are home early. I didn’t expect you for – for hours and hours!’

  And now she had met and kissed him, full in the light of the hall-lamp. ‘Why, what’s the matter, darling …? You are ill!’ She was peering as if out of an enormous fog at the narrow, beloved, pallid countenance, the pale lips, the hunted, haunted, misery-stricken light-brown eyes in those pits of dark entreaty and despair.

  ‘Is it that’s brought you home?’

  He continued to stare at her as if, spectacles lost, he were endeavouring to read a little book in very small print and in an unfamiliar language. His mouth opened, as if to yawn; he began to tremble a little, and said, ‘Oh, no; nothing much. A headache; I’m tired. Where were you?’

  ‘Me?’ But her lips remained faintly, mournfully, sympathetically smiling; her dark eyes were as clear and guileless and empty of reflections as pools of water under the windless blue of the sky. ‘I was in William’s room. It’s hateful to say it now, Edward – now that you are so tired yourself – but – but I’m rather afraid, poor mite, he’s in for another cold – a little chill – and I shouldn’t be surprised if Sallie … But don’t worry about that – because, because there’s nothing of co
urse at all yet to worry about. It’s you I’m thinking of. You look so dreadfully fagged and – what a welcome! … There’s nothing …?’

  Her vocabulary had at last begun to get a little obstinate and inadequate. ‘You don’t mean, Edward, there’s anything seriously wrong? I fancy, you know’ – she deliberately laid her hand for an instant on his, ‘I fancy you may be the least little bit feverish yourself – you too. Well …’ She turned away, flung up a hand as if to flag off a railway train, ‘I’ll get you something hot at once.

  ‘And Edward’ – she turned her head over her shoulder, to find him as motionless as she had left him, in almost as stolid and meaningless an attitude as ‘Dr Wilson’s’ had been in the kitchen, as he stood brooding on the nightmare faces in the darkness of the glass. ‘There is just one thing, if you could manage it. Just in case, would you in a moment or two first wheel Sallie’s cot into William’s room. I’ve lit the fire – and I had to ask Dr Wilson to come. I’m so dreadfully stupid and anxious, when – even when there’s no reason to be.’

  The two faces had starkly confronted one another again, but neither could decipher with any absolute certainty the hitherto unrevealed characters now inscribed on them. Each of them was investigating the map of a familiar country, but the cartographer must now have sketched it from an unprecedentedly eccentric angle. The next moment she had turned away, had whisked upstairs and down again, leaving him free, at liberty, to dispose of himself – and of anything else he might be inclined to. In every family life there are surely potential keepsakes that would be far better destroyed; and perhaps a moment some time might come. But now …

  When she returned with her tray and its contents – a steaming tumbler of milk, a few biscuits and a decanter containing a little whisky – she found him standing beside William’s bedroom fire. He watched her, as with the utmost care she put down her burden on the little wicker table.

  ‘Millie,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure … But, well – it was, I suppose, because of William’s being ill that you haven’t yet been into – into the other room, our bedroom. And so’ – he had gulped, as if there was some little danger of producing his very heart for her inspection – ‘you have not seen this?’ He was holding towards her the unfolded note, and with trembling fingers she found herself actually pretending to read its scribbled lines again.

  Her face had whitened; she had begun to despair of herself, conscious beyond everything else – the tumult in her mind, the ravaging of her heart – that she could hardly endure the mingled miseries, remorse, humiliation in his eyes, in the very tones of his voice, yet listening at the same time to a message of ineffable reassurance. He has not then deceived me again! At last she had contrived to nod, her chin shaking so stupidly for a while that she could scarcely utter a word. ‘Yes. I have read it. I put it back … couldn’t face it when I heard you. The children – I had to have time. I’m sorry, Edward.’

  ‘“Sorry!”’ he echoed.

  ‘I mean – it was an awful, well, revelation; but I was stupid; I ought to have seen … I did see. But we won’t – I can’t go into that now. You are tired, ill; but you are back … for the present.’

  Her eyes had managed at last to glance at him, and then to break away, and to keep from weeping. And, as if even in his sleep his usual tact and wisdom had not deserted him, William had suddenly flung back his scorching sheet and in a gasping voice was muttering to an unseen listener in some broken, unintelligible lingo that yet ended with a sound resembling the word faces. ‘There, darling,’ she answered him, smoothing back his fair fringe from his forehead, ‘I know. They are gone; all gone now; and the blind is down – to its very last inch.’

  She stayed watching him, couldn’t look back just yet.

  ‘You see, Millie … She’ – her husband was trying to explain – ‘that is, we had arranged to meet. It’s hopeless to attempt to say anything more just now … I waited. She sent … She didn’t come.’

  ‘I see. And so?’

  ‘Millie, Millie. It wasn’t, it wasn’t you. Oh, I can’t bear it any longer. If I had dreamed – the children!’ He had flung himself into a pretty round basket chair and sat shuddering, his face hidden in his lean, bloodless hands.

  The few minute sounds in the room, the peevish creakings of the chair, William’s rapid, snoring breathing, the fluttering of the fire, were interrupted by the noise of brakes and wheels rasping to a standstill in the street below. A brisk yet cautious knocking had followed, awakening an echo, it seemed, in the very hollow of her breast bone.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s where that goes. There’s no time now.’ The scrap of paper, more swiftly than a vanishing card in a conjuring trick, had been instantly devoured by the voracious flames, had thinned to an exquisitely delicate fluttering ash, and then, as if with a sudden impulse, wafted itself out of sight like a tiny toy balloon into the sooty vacancy of the chimney.

  ‘Listen. Must you see the doctor, tonight? Unless it’s not – you know – well bad ’flu? Wouldn’t it be better not? I’ll tell him; I could find out; I could say you had gone to bed. Quick, I must go.’ Every nerve in her body was clamouring for motion, action, something to face, something to do.

  He nodded. ‘And you’ll come back?’

  ‘Yes … I’ll try. Oh, Edward, I’m sorry, sorry. If only there were words to say it. It must have been awful – awful!’ She hesitated, gazing at his bent head, the familiar hands …

  And now the doctor, having deftly packed up Sallie again, burning hot but seemingly resigned to whatever fate might bring, and having carefully wiped his thermometer on the clean huckaback towel Emilia had handed him, was stuffing his stethoscope back into his little brown case. An almost passionate admiration filled her breast at his assured, unhurried movements, and with it a sort of mute, all-reconciling amusement to see how closely, deep within, behind these gestures, and the careful choice of words, he resembled his small and solemn understudy, William.

  She was returning earnestly glance for glance, intently observant of every least change of expression in his dark decisive face, of timbre in his voice. Practically every one of the hungered-for, familiar, foreseen, all-satisfying assurances – like a tiny flock of innocent sheep pattering through a gateway – had been uttered and sagaciously nodded to: ‘It may be just a feverish attack; it might, it might be ’flu.’ ‘Don’t forget, Mrs Hadleigh, they are down one moment and up the next!’ ‘I’ll send round a bottle of medicine tonight, almost at once, and some powders.’ ‘I’ll look in again first thing in the morning.’ Then he had paused, little leather case in hand, his eyes fixed on the fire.

  Some day, she told herself, she must retaliate in kind: ‘You must understand, Dr Wilson, that at this hour of the night it would be utterly stupid of you to breathe the word pneumonia, which takes weeks and weeks and weeks; may easily be fatal; and one has just to wait for the crisis!’ Or, ‘Don’t be mistaken, Dr Wilson, even if you were at death’s door yourself I shouldn’t hesitate to ring you up if their temperatures go over 103°’ – that kind of thing.

  ‘You know, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he was beginning again, ‘it just beats me why you mothers – quite rational, sensible, almost cynically practical creatures some of you, simply wear yourselves out with worry and anxiety when there’s scarcely a shred of justification for it. Quite uselessly. Getting thin and haggard, wasting away, losing all that precious youth and beauty. I say I often think these things – wish I could express them. You simply refuse to heed the lesson in life: that really great Englishman’s, Mr Asquith’s – “Wait and See”. Condensing, don’t you see, and not squandering all energy, impulse and reserves. “Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.” Isn’t that good sense? It’s what’s called an old wives’ saying, of course – not a mother’s. But I could have saved dozens of precious lives and bodies and all but souls, if only … well, literally saved them, I mean, a deuce of a lot of wear and tear.’

  She was drinking in his words, this delicious lecture
, these scoldings; devouring them, as if they were manna dipped in honey, the waters of life. They were a rest and peace beyond expression. A ready help in time of trouble. He shall lead his flock like a shepherd. Yea, though I walk … Why all this Bible? Dr Wilson was not a parson; he was just a doctor. And then another Dr Wilson had piped up in memory again, ‘“You said that I was the doctor; and now you are kissing me, Mummie!” … “I could often kiss lots of doctors!”’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she heard herself meekly assuring him. ‘I’m utterly stupid about these things. And of course if we were all sensible savages or gipsies there wouldn’t be … Even – oh, but you can’t think what a comfort it is to – to be reassured.’

  He was eyeing her now more closely, totting up and subtracting yeses and noes, it seemed, on his own account, and on hers. It was with difficulty she met the straight clear scrutiny. ‘Well, there we are,’ he decided. ‘Just look what lovely babies you have. Everything a woman could wish for! Gipsies be dashed. There are, I assure you, my dear Mrs Hadleigh, spinsters galore in this parish who … How’s your husband?’

  Her dark shining eyes had now at last quivered in their sockets, if only for the fraction of a second.

  ‘It sounds very silly,’ the words were squeezing out like cooing turtle doves through too narrow an exit, ‘but he’s not very well either! It’s, it’s almost funny, ridiculous – all three at once. Isn’t it? He came home rather late from – from the office, and he’s gone to bed.’ It seemed a pity that one’s cheeks should flatly refuse not to flame up, when one’s eyes were hard as brass. ‘The fact is, Dr Wilson, he refused to see you. You know what men are. But could it be, do you think,’ a little nod towards William’s bed had helped her out, ‘that too?’