Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  She listened eagerly, and I took out my curious treasure and in a beam of moonlight laid it in her hand. We stooped together over its oval face, its one pale delicate finger following the unrecorded hours. And there, beneath the tree, the moonlight glinting on the crystal, she read out the German inscription in a slow faltering voice, and put it into English for me:

  For him who bears me I of Love and Death tell out Eternity:

  While Life tells only Moments.

  The face she now turned to me had become grave and absent. Some sudden resolve seemed to have arrested and darkened her eyes. Her breast rose like a dove’s to a sigh, yet no sigh came. ‘What does it mean? Who said that? Do you believe it?’ she said. ‘It’s wildly romantic – sentimental!’

  ‘I don’t know what it means.’ Weariness and revulsion had come over me. I shivered. My good angel had left me. I felt how much was gone from me, lost, betrayed – my secret self. Could anyone have ever imagined it worth even a pinch of dust – the hoard of one of Gessen’s cobwebs?

  But she seemed to be completely indifferent to what was passing in my mind, merely pelted me with questions about Gessen, about the shop, the bureau, the ‘charming curio’. Did I believe in it? And might she wear it – for only one night, one day? Just to see?

  ‘To see what?’ I asked dully.

  ‘Oh, to see. Do let me, dear, dear friend! I do think of you. Who knows? – why love might come. One day only – I will give it back tomorrow, here – here in this very moonlight. Fancy, all your kindness, and I not a single word in reply!’

  She stooped her head at the foot of the narrow steps, and kissed my hand! I drew back awkwardly, on fire, loving her so much in my heart that – yet again! – all words seemed blasphemous, and the fool’s voice I had been listening to, as if in a dream, insane.

  She ran up in front of me, and waved me good-night …

  From over Weissehäuser the moon had long descended. Its cataracts roared faintly. A few of its upper windows still showed lights behind their blinds – one by one they went out. As had mine! All dark – but empty. What had been said – had it not now been irrevocably lost and wasted? I might still love; but could I ever love so truly? The nightingale having sung, falls silent. How different are the two silences – before the song and after!

  I went to bed; slept soundly, without dream; and woke unhappy.

  All that morning I haunted Pauline’s doorstep, not to enquire, nor daring to return to Gessen again without his treasure. At last, a little after two, I saw her descending the hill from the pine woods; and Arthur was her companion. I turned back, burning tears pricking my eyes; remorse, anger, vanity, envy, despair and faithful love battling for mastery in my irrational foolish heart.

  She left him and ran to me, her face a little anxious, her every movement one of rapture.

  ‘There!’ she said, putting the watch into my hand. ‘My promise. It is a mystery. What does it mean? – what does it mean? Don’t tell Arthur. Not a word – oh, no. And congratulate me, Harry. You will? You do? And forgive. You have never never been angry with me, not for a single moment. And you see I cannot help being happy, can I now?’

  I took the watch, staring vaguely into her eyes. Gloom and resentment seemed to vanish as if by enchantment. Why! after all, I was alive, I could still live on. There never was such sunshine as this upon her hair; never such shadows in unfathomable wells of water as these within her eyes.

  ‘Forgive you!’ I cried. ‘Oh, may you be always happy! I love you. I shall never never forget you. Good-bye, Pauline.’

  I turned from her and hastened away. My thoughts were so many, and they raced so fast through my mind that I hardly seemed to think at all. Beauty was left – the beauty of remembrance; and could there be despair where there had never been hope? It is difficult to recall the mazy meanderings of one’s youth. Still, one must at least attempt to be just – even to a past self – for who knows what future self may not some day be upon us! I loved her foolishly, guilelessly; but it was my love that was my riches; her peace – that was its hope. Yes, I verily believe that that bemused and obsessed young man was as insufferably unselfish as all that!

  Gessen met me at his shop door. I poured out in broken jargon all my doings into that long, bristling ear. We seemed to be lifelong friends, old comrades. He understood me. It was, after all, but his own heart’s confusion made articulate. He patted my shoulder; he purred; he glared; asking no questions. And when I had finished, as best I could, tears were running down his cheeks. He stooped, and putting his hands tenderly on my shoulders, kissed my cheek.

  It was childish, fatuous, infamously un-English. At the back of my mind I realized, even while my heart seemed to have swollen too big for my body, that he was a sentimental old fool, who might much better be preparing for his winding-sheet than doting on a dark, taciturn, sensual woman who – as I guessed – had never perhaps looked twice at him, unless in the hope of extorting something really worth her while. But he and I now shared a sovereign secret. He had not been a magician in vain – the craftsman who had set these wheels revolving, and who had graved his cryptic wisdom on the dial!

  ‘Ah, it was prave, prave,’ the old man kept repeating. ‘You vlowed out, my goot boy. Luff, luff, luff! Haf courage! It vill be vell. It vill be very vell.’

  He stretched out his great hands, head on one side, and beamed on me through his tears. But his was the delusion now. His own vaporous, futile sentiment prompted him. Hope like a pyramid of blossom had sprung up in his heart. Here was his fate at last. I left him as twilight gathered, sitting in the gloom of his narrow shop, the watch in his hand, his face like some old children’s book of Märchen.

  Yet somehow, I knew not why, all that evening I continued to think of him, as well as of Pauline – of his love, and of hers, and of mine. Was there ever such a trio! Would his be as disastrous too, his hour of many hours? Would it be better to hold his peace? make no mad venture? Better the plateau than the abyss. What would his tomorrow be – rejected?

  I ran out late, and through deserted streets. No need to knock – his door stood unlatched. A candle burned beneath his wooden mirror, with its vacantly smiling shadowy Cupids. He sat in his workaday chair, in his beautiful best clothes, polished, starched, and shaven. His astonished face was grey, and smiling in its stillness; his mouth queerly ajar. His body was slightly bent, his head stooping, his eyes looking down. And pale beneath the candles, in his great seamed open palm, lay the beautiful and mysterious object that seemed in some fantastic fashion to have been the cause of our common undoing. And though my poor old friend’s heart in that mortal body would never stir again, I could still hear – thin, ecstatic, unhastening, through, above and beneath the babble of the pendulums around us – the infinite small summons of its tick.

  But when in panic haste I had run off to the baker’s – and in spite of the gleam above the fanlight, showing that he was busy at his job, I knocked for ten solid minutes on his too too solid door before he appeared – and then returned with him; there sat Gessen precisely as I had left him, but his open hand was empty; the watch was gone.

  * First published as ‘The Talisman of Weisshausen’ in Lady’s Realm, March 1907.

  In the Forest*

  While my father was away at the war, I marked off each day with my knife on a piece of wood. He had started when it was scarcely light beneath the trees. I was very sleepy so early in the morning while he ate his breakfast, and as I watched him on the other side of the lighted candle drinking his steaming tea in his saucer, my eyes kept rolling back of themselves because I was so tired. And everything in the room was plain one moment and the next all blurred and wavering. The baby was asleep in the cradle. The wind was still roaring in the tops of the trees, but the candle burned clear, because the wind did not come down into the house.

  When my father opened the door I saw that the grass was strewn with green leaves, and falling leaves were in the air, and the wind overhead sounded like water, though the
tree-trunks hardly swayed even, down here. But it was not raining when he started, only the leaves were wet with rain and the bark of the trees was darkened with wet. I asked him to bring me back a long rifle. He kept rubbing his hands over his face and blinking his eyes and listening to the wind as if he heard the guns. Two or three times he came back to say good-bye to my mother. And even when at last he didn’t come back he kept turning his face, looking over his shoulder at us. There was no sun shining yet that morning, but the bright light of the sky gleamed on the wet leaves. I asked Mother if Father was glad to be going to the war. But she was crying over the baby, so I went out into the forest till dinner.

  My mother was more cheerful at dinner, and we had some hot soup. After dinner I chopped up some wood in the shed. It made me very hot and excited chopping up the wood. It was getting dark when I came back, carrying the logs. It seemed that the wind grew more angry in the twilight, and although it still roared like the mill-water in the village, yet it whistled too, and the leaves kept dropping, heavy with rain. And now it was not clear, but cold and misty round the hut. I went in with the logs.

  Mother was sitting in the wooden chair with the baby in her arms. She looked as if she was pretending. I went close and stared at her, and found that she was fast asleep. The baby was asleep too, but it scarcely seemed to be really breathing – it was like a moth fluttering on a pin; its face was quite pale and still in its sleep, but its cheeks were very red. I thought I would make a fire again without asking Mother’s leave, so as to be more cheerful; besides, I could feel the cold air oozing through the crannies of the timbers, and it was getting so dark I could see only the white things in the room. The rushing sound of the wind never ceased at all.

  As soon as the flames began to spring up, and the sparks to crack out of the wood, my mother woke up. She looked at me with a curious face; but soon she remembered that she had been asleep, and she enjoyed the warmth of the fire.

  On the next day I woke up where I had fallen asleep by the hearth, and it was a very quiet morning. I looked out of the window, and saw the sun shining yellow between the branches; and many of the boughs were now all but bare. But the fallen leaves lay thick on the ground as far as I could see, and some of them were still quite large and green. I was glad my father was gone away, because now I could do just as I pleased. I did not want the trouble of lighting the fire, so I went out into the forest, and down to visit the snares. There was a young hare caught by the leg in one, and the leaves were all round him. His eyes were bleeding, and not very bright. I killed him with a crack on the neck as I had seen Father kill the hares, and carried him back by his hind legs. The leaves made an incessant rustling as I walked through them. I could see the blue sky above the trees; it was very pale, like a ribbon. I stood still a minute, carrying the hare, and listening to find if I could hear the guns. But I heard only a bird singing and a rushing sound, as if a snake were going away under the leaves. Sometimes I came to branches blown down to the ground, and even now, here and there, a leaf would fall slowly through the air, twirling, to be with all the rest. I enjoyed my broth for dinner very much, and the hare lasted for three days, with some turnips.

  I asked Mother how long Father would be away. She said she could not tell. And I wondered how they would carry back his body if he was killed in the war.

  I stayed out in the forest nearly all that day because the baby kept on crying. It was dark, and the window was lit up when I came home, and still the baby was fretting. Its eyes were gone dull, and it would not go to sleep in the night, though Mother kept walking up and down, crooning and mumbling to it, and rocking it in her arms. She said it was very ill, and she held it pressed close to her. I asked her if it was going to die, but she only walked a little faster, and, as I was very sleepy, we did not talk much that night. The baby was still crying when I woke up, but not so loud. It was bleating small and shrill; like a young lamb, I told Mother. I felt very refreshed after my sleep, and very hungry. I lit the fire and boiled the kettle, and put the plates on the table, and the loaf.

  After breakfast I told Mother I was going down to the old pool to fish, and that I would bring her some fish for dinner. But she looked at me and called me to her.

  ‘The baby is dreadfully ill,’ she said, ‘and we must go without the fish. Feel its poor thin hot hands. That’s the fever. Do you love it? Then take it in your arms.’

  But I shook my head. It looked very ugly because its face was all puckered up, and it just wailed and wailed like a gnat in the air.

  ‘I think I would like to go fishing, Mother,’ I said, ‘and I promise you shall have the biggest I catch.’

  But she kept on persisting that the baby was too ill to wait, that it was very queer, and that I must go for the doctor in the village. It wasn’t so very far, she said, and I could fish tomorrow.

  ‘But it is far,’ I told her; ‘and it doesn’t look so very bad; and it might be windy and cold tomorrow. It’s only crying,’ I said. And I ran out before she could catch me.

  But I did not catch any fish. I suppose they would not bite because I had been wicked. So I tied up my lines and came home about three in the afternoon. As I stood at the door waiting before going in, I heard a sound far away, and then, in a while, again, through the forest. And I knew it was the guns and cannons on the other side of the forest. The baby was not crying now, when I went in. But my mother did not turn her head to speak to me. She was kneeling beside its old rocking-cradle, some of her hair hanging down on her shoulders.

  ‘I’ll go for the doctor now, Mother; but the guns are firing; you can hear them now if you come and listen at the door.’

  But when I told her about the guns, she began to cry out loud, and hid her face in the coverlet on the cradle. I watched her a little while, and I could hear the cannons going off quite plainly now; only far away, like a drum when you put your hand on it.

  I got very hot standing still, so I put my tackle on the hook and sat down by the hearth.

  ‘Shall I go for the doctor now, Mother? It’ll be dark before I get back.’

  Mother turned on me very wild. ‘Oh, you coward, you coward!’ she said. ‘Dark – it’s dark enough for me!’

  She startled me very much by saying this and I felt very uncomfortable. I went nearer and looked. The baby’s face was white, and its eyelids were like white wax. Its lips were the colour of its hands, almost blue.

  ‘Is it dead, Mother?’ I asked. But she did not answer me, only shook her shoulders. I walked away and looked out of the door. First I felt hot and then my back shivered. And I began to cry too, because I had not gone in the morning for the doctor. I did not dry my eyes because the tears ran quite hot down my cheeks, and I could hear them dripping off my chin upon my jacket. I liked to have the door open, although it was cold and grey in the afternoon.

  My mother came to the doorway and drew me close to her as if she were sorry, with her hand clutching my head. I could not cry any more now, but stood still; and even then the guns and cannons went on firing. And sometimes birds silently flew between the trees away from the sound. I wondered if Father was fighting near the cannons.

  The next day it was so cold again my mother made me a jacket out of an old coat of Father’s. It was just hemmed up, and I wore it instead of my other jacket when I went out. She had drawn the coverlet over the baby’s face, so that it now lay in a kind of little house in its cradle. I thought I would please Mother, so found the place and read out of the Bible about Herod; but the candle burned very sooty and smoky, so that I could not read very well, and left out the long words.

  The next morning Mother told me to go down to the village and tell the sexton that the baby was dead so that it could be buried in the churchyard.

  I started out with my switch, about ten o’clock. It was a warm day; so I was wearing my old jacket again, and the air smelled of the leaves, which were withered and yellow and brown. I went on whistling; but it was more than five miles to the village. The robins were singing on t
he twigs, and I saw some crows flying in the sky. It was so quiet in the forest, that the cannons seemed to shake the air with their sound.

  And while I was walking along, not very fast, and looking out for wild berries, I heard a noise in the distance of men running, and then the sound of a rifle quite near, and a scream like a rabbit, but much more loud and awful. I hid behind a tree, and when the forest was quiet again I ran home as quick as I could. But I did not like to tell Mother that I had been frightened of the soldiers, because she had called me a coward already. So I said instead that the sexton was nowhere to be found in the village, that he must have gone to the war himself, and that no one would come for fear of the soldiers.

  She looked me full in the face with her eyes. She looked so earnestly and so hard at me that I could not help moving my shoulder a little. And at that she turned away, and I felt very wretched because I knew that she had seen it was a lie. But I did not say anything.

  All the while I sat there my eyes would not keep from looking at the cradle. I was very hungry. But since Mother was putting on her shawl I knew that she was going out presently. Then, I thought, when she is gone, I will eat as much as ever I can. There were some bones in the cupboard well worth picking, I knew. When Mother had put on her shawl and her bonnet, she lifted the baby out of the cradle.

  ‘I must carry it to the churchyard myself,’ she said, but more to herself than to me. There were no tears in her eyes; they were dark all round.

  ‘Won’t you kiss your little brother, Robbie?’ It was wrapped up in her wedding shawl, which she had sometimes shown me of an evening, out of the chest. I began to cry when I kissed its forehead. It was as cold as a stone, as a piece of dough, and looked very heavy, yet thin, and its face was quite still now.

  ‘Take care of the house, Rob,’ she said. ‘Don’t go out; and bolt the door after me.’

  I watched her hasten off along the narrow path between the trees. There was a light like crimson in the forest, and I knew that the sun would soon be setting. It was silly of her not to have gone earlier. It was very quiet now; and I was afraid it would soon be dark.