Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  And even as, having succeeded in soundlessly opening and shutting the outer door behind him, he vanished, she realized that it was no creature of flesh and blood, foulest of all pursuers, whom she had been sent out in search of, but one who had ‘gone on’ – as she would herself, some day; and, for purposes of his own, it seemed, or, the mere creation of terrified fantasy, had come back. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, left behind of pursuer or pursued except a dingy scrap of cardboard, which by mischance must have fallen out of the old man’s great-coat pocket, and now lay on the further seat. She watched it awhile; then stole across, and lifting it into the hard white light of the lamp, read its ornate inscription: ‘Mr James Glyde, Wardrobe Dealer, 918B, Old Kent Road’. She continued to read the words, and with far more concentration than she had given to Sir William Temple. Then she stuffed the smudged little card into her bag and sat down again. Life may admit of many pregnant pauses, though only of one conclusion.

  With a brief reassuring blast from the engine, the train had begun to move again. A dark, smooth-faced young man in a blue Eton jacket looked in, shouted his summons and withdrew. And still she sat on, unable to stir.

  It was stupid of her. Had she dined then, and dined boldly, with half a bottle of wine for company, she might have faced the guard and the stranger – who appeared at her carriage door immediately after the train had left its first stopping place – with cooler brains and a nimbler tongue.

  AND THEN …

  She might have. But in any case, quite apart from any question of decency, of public morals, even of common-sense, had it been discreet or even helpful to deny flatly that she had had any company at all in her carriage, and certainly not that of a squat little ageing man, whom her interrogator, straight-nosed, heavy-chinned, and cold-blue-eyed under his bowler hat, had described from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, button by button, as if he were reading the particulars from the pocket-book in his hand? Yes, and while the guard, with lean cheekbones and a trace of paternal whisker, watched steadily on. The ‘individual’ in question had been seen to enter the train in that last frantic scramble – this end of the train, too. ‘But surely,’ she expostulated, ‘I should have noticed such a man, even if he hadn’t come in here? Still,’ she raised her gentle eyelids, ‘I was reading, and perhaps —’ she shrugged a narrow shoulder towards the books on the seat, and the other two had followed her gesture, as if in prophetic mimicry of one of their titles – Faint but Pursuing. Indeed, yes, there it was,– in black on red – proof positive! And a curious drop of the underlip of the man in the hard hat showed that he had taken it in. But he hadn’t stayed to ask the name of its author. He was explaining that the individual he had mentioned was wanted, wanted very badly, and was carrying a carpet bag. And she had realized perfectly well, and even perfectly calmly, that neither of her questioners was being in the least convinced by her replies.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, miss,’ the spokesman had assured her again, ‘but this is a serious business, you see; a very serious business, as you’d realize’ – he had glanced an instant with lifted eyebrow at the guard – ‘if you had the full particulars.’ At this her tongue had moved gently in her closed mouth.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she had answered. ‘But, of course! Still, what – what has he done? Why?’

  Not that she was pining for any exact answer to these questions. So that, if anything, it was a relief to be assured that her what was neither here nor there. And at last with a slight frown of impatience she had been asked to oblige her questioner with her own name and address.

  ‘Oh, yes – my address.’ She had at once opened her bag, and, still looking at the speaker and not at her fumbling fingers, had presented him forthwith with a card. The fair-skinned face had not only frowned then, but hardened, as even the austerest can.

  ‘What’s this, miss?’ he said. ‘I asked you for your name and address.’ At which it seemed as though her whole body had evaporated; that it had become nothing but a vacancy with eyes whereby to look out of it. It was all over. The Fiend had betrayed her. Traditore, unhappy! She had rendered up the old man’s card. Still, even in this predicament, thank God, she had merely stayed looking, and waiting.

  Then, ‘“Mr Charles Ashby”,’ the other had begun reciting throatily, ‘“The Old Mill, Mieklesham”’ – though he refrained from adding the pencilled scribble on it: So very sorry – and disappointed – dearest, I couldn’t wait. Business.

  ‘That’s Devon,’ said the guard, ‘Mieklesham’ – the only words he had uttered. ‘There’s another in Wiltshire.’ And Lavinia’s heart, it seemed, had begun to beat again, though it was not exactly a love-bird’s, even if in a cage.

  ‘Mr Ashby, oh yes.’ She held out her fingers. ‘How very silly of me! That’s where I’m going to. You,’ and her face positively lit up with intelligence, ‘you want where I have come from.’ And now she all but buried her small nose inside her gaping bag. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s not another friend of mine, I hope?’

  The inspector had accepted her card; indeed, had tucked it into the flap of his pocket-book as if for a prize keepsake. And then, having firmly closed the book again, he bestowed on her a last full quiet glance.

  ‘Well, miss,’ he said ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. If you haven’t, you haven’t. And,’ he glanced sidelong again at the fatherly guard, ‘p’raps it’s just as well. There are them it’s best to keep your distance from. And,’ he raised his face a little, almost as if, houndlike, he had snuffed up the imperceptible, ‘this one has gone as far as most!’

  ‘I’m sure it’s very, very kind of you,’ Lavinia had assured him, ‘I wish … And if …’ And then she had drawn down her pretty narrow veil again, and was alone.

  THE CARE IS OVER

  The highly competent, even if they are also, which is unusual, impulsive in disposition when vexed or put out, though only for trivial reasons, are apt to be unobservant. Charles was competent, but not impulsive, and far from subtle. Yet even the reception of his first greeting to her on the black, oil-lit, snow-encrusted platform might have warned him to tread cautiously. Women are so temperamental. His hurried bearish embrace from out of that long thick country ulster of his had been as little of a comfort as a tonic. The train was late, he was complaining – ridiculously, fatuously, late; his damn fool of a chauffeur had run out of petrol, and they would have to wait for the village fly. ‘My gad, these people!’ he kept repeating. And then suddenly, but much too late, ‘What’s wrong, Lavinia? You look as white as a sheet, and, by gad, shivering! Come into this miserable little hole for a moment. What’s wrong? I actually told the feller …’

  The train had by now abandoned the tiny country station to darkness and to them, and the porter on the opposite platform was extinguishing the last of its lamps. Indeed, he left them only one, and that out of sight, for their few minutes’ talk, in the magic starry moon-dusk of winter snow.

  ‘Now,’ Charles had remarked yet again, ‘tell me all about it.’ Why then hadn’t she done as he suggested? Why hadn’t she reposed her fair head on his manly shoulder and – wept her heart out? Why had she managed to confide in him no more than a colourless fraction of her story? Why had she left out the least mention of that absurd yet valiant search of the train, the carpet bag, the furtive exit? Surely it couldn’t merely have been because Charles had said, ‘My damn fool of a chauffeur!’ so early? Anyhow, that couldn’t be the only reason. And it was nothing but nice of him to assure her again and again that, if he had shared her journey, he would have knocked the inspector’s silly head off. ‘It was monstrous: simply monstrous! If only I! … I should have refused to say anything – anything,’ he repeated for the ninth time, and Lavinia, chilled to the bone, her heart thumping under her ribs, and her teeth chattering to such a degree that she stuttered and almost hiccupped with every word she said, had asked, ‘To which?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Charles had inquired angrily. ‘“To which?”’r />
  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘to the poor old man or to the nice inspector?’

  ‘“Poor old man!” You mean you talked – to him?’

  ‘Of course I mean I talked to him.’

  ‘My gad,’ Charles had begun, and then the cabman had interrupted them, and they had sat together side by side in the ancient vehicle, noiselessly wheeling and jogging on like marionettes together along the frosted country lane, while the sinking moon obliquely stared in on them from across fields made desolate with snow. But by now they were almost quarrelling.

  ‘You mean,’ she was saying, ‘that if you had been me – I – you would never in any circumstances have had a single word to say to any utterly miserable old man if you were alone with him – anywhere? You mean that?’

  ‘But, my dear child, I’m not you; I didn’t say “a single word”; and it wasn’t any old man. You said so. Some sniffling sneak-thief, or worse. Why, the police were after him! You said so.’ He made a gesture with his gloved right hand – clean across the starry winter night. ‘You don’t seem to be able to see the solid facts of the situation.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she heard herself calling to him, as if out of the year before last. ‘I – I see you!’ But no, her feeble little sally had passed unheeded. ‘Besides, isn’t it harder and even more valuable to see through things – especially solid facts, as you call them? We aren’t.’ And at that very instant Charles himself had become almost as transparent as glass – plate glass.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, Lavinia, let us try to keep to the point. I am speak ing of a whining old blackguard who molests a lonely woman on a railway journey – and you say, “We aren’t”.’

  ‘No, Charles. Perhaps you are right. It’s easy not to think if you don’t feel – to know, I mean. You are right. You always are.’ Her teeth had stopped chattering for a moment, and she was colloguing feverishly with the moon while her hand, visible almost to a blind man in that glare, lay idle, nerveless, and homeless on her knee. ‘I think it is just possible he was even worse than that. And though I know perfectly well —’ and then suddenly she turned. ‘But supposing, just for example, you were being hunted. Hunted, do you hear?’ and her eyes ranged like a March hare the untrodden wilds beneath the winter stars, ‘Oh, no, you needn’t snigger. Not the police. Hunted, I said; haunted, threatened, tracked down, and you couldn’t even wait to … BLACKMAIL. Is there nothing in this miserable world can make us realize – others?’

  But Charles would not listen this time either. ‘Don’t be silly, Lavinia. Control yourself. You need not shout at me. You are utterly unhinged, hysterical. No, I say; you are not to utter another word till we are home. Mother will see to all that.’ She seemed at this to have shut her mouth and her soul at the same moment – which, with that exclamatory blackmail of hers still echoing on in consciousness, now somehow resembled an eavesdropper in the midst of phantoms looking in on the contents of a morgue. And the small chamber they were sharing, smaller even than a railway compartment, though they sat there leagues asunder, jogged silently on into time and space.

  And ‘Mother’, of course, had done her very best to see to all that; so understanding, so managing, so silkily and exquisitely tactful.

  Even after these retrospective nocturnal ruminations had come to an end, Lavinia had continued to stare up from her bed into the ceiling at that ponderous old beam – though what connexion, in the pink and white room so seductively prepared for her, this unassuming object had with the train of her thoughts, she hadn’t any actualized notion. And the worst of it was that though, safe but not secure under the roof of the Old Mill, she had at last, however late, dined boldly – and possibly had a little shocked the hovering, insistent old lady by preferring brandy to ‘this nice light wine, not very dry, my dear’ – she had nonetheless utterly failed to satisfy Charles as to why she had not at any rate ordered something on the train.

  ‘Good Lord, you have only to push the bell. Besides, you get better food then sometimes than – that filthy soup, that odious piecrust – all out of the same tin.’

  ‘Gourmet! Fie!’ she had smiled at him, with an infantile display of irony, and then had dipped again at her brandy.

  ‘And you really mean to say you sat on and on with that verminous old … until – where did he get out, by the way?’

  But with heaven’s help the village Waits had then suddenly chimed in with, The Lord at first did Adam make Out of the dust and clay … And Charles, being a new arrival in these parts, in spite of fuming at their ‘hideous din’, had gone out. And – his best new grand seigneur voice still resounding in the porch – she had managed to shiver to her feet and insist that very moment on going to her room. There, with a last good-night kiss as of faded rose-leaves on her cheek, she had sat down – as if she were pretending to be insane – on her bed …

  And now she was calm again: though one, alas, may be calm but still horrified. So she continued to watch, her hot-water bottle no longer much of a companion between the sheets, just in case her fellow-passenger or his old friend should decide – well, to come out into the open. Her open, that is; for they had enjoyed, of course, their own also. And it was thus the maypole parlour-maid, a little shocked, found her in the morning – fast, fast asleep; but with the lamp, held rigidly on tip-toe by the small china Cupid on her bedside table, still burning on, in faint conflict with the reflected splendour of the Christmas snow.

  * First published in The Times Weekly Edition, 10 November 1932.

  Miss Miller*

  Because she had very little breath left, and because it must be far from easy to sob and run at the same time, the little girl with the square-bobbed flaxen hair dropped into a walk as she came in under the shade of the wide-spreading chestnut tree. And there, at sight of the figure that sat bolt upright in the middle of the seat, she at once stopped dead. So complete was her surprise that she had even forgotten to sob any more. She simply opened her tear-washed eyes and stared. And Miss Miller, in her tight soldier-like jacket and peculiar hat, seemed to be taking no more notice of her than a lighted lamp-post takes of a moth.

  But Miss Miller had seen her right enough. Miss Miller had kept a weather-eye open, had watched her come tumbling across the gentle green grass slopes and under the trees and into the sunshine and into the shade again. It was only her funny little way to pretend not to have seen, though she could no more have explained why than she could explain why these long balmy summer mornings she always sat bolt upright on a seat that had clearly been constructed with such beautiful scroll-like curves at the back of it on purpose to make those who had time thus to idle the day away uncomfortable.

  Not that this little creature had ever seen Miss Miller before, had even so much as suspected she was there. That was certain. Though, since they frequently shared the amenities of the park, she very well might have done so. The park-keepers knew Miss Miller all right, and there wasn’t one that wouldn’t nod her a jocular if slightly ironical good morning. So would the elephantine policeman at the gates – and then perhaps solemnly wink at the man who was piling up the dead leaves in his three-wheeled handcart. Hardly a day went by but Miss Miller was to be seen wandering about in these particular parts, observing the observable with a quick bird-like turn of the head, or sitting just as she was now, with her sharp black eyes and her long sharp nose, one cotton-gloved hand resting on the long-beaked stork’s head of her umbrella, her gaze fixed on the sun-sheened waters of the ornamental pond, almost as though she were eternally on the point of being lost in some fantastically quizzical daydream.

  Only ‘almost’, though; for Miss Miller had very little ultimate respect for daydreams. She preferred, or rather she restricted herself to, the actual – but with no excessive respect for that either. And however motionless her pose might be, however absent-looking the expression on her long, odd, sallow face, and in her coal-black cavernous eyes, she noticed positively everything that was going on around her – striding gluttonous starlings, clumsy, strutting, b
urnished wood-pigeons, fashionable nursemaids, smartly stepping soldier-boys with their paper-squill puttees and funny little metal-headed swagger canes, ladies and gentlemen politely conversing on the gravel paths, or less politely colloguing under the trees, the swans for ever amorous of their own snowy images on the lustrous pale-blue water, and the wing-sailed toy-boats braving the breezes, their small round-behinded owners stooping like Chinese dummies at the edge of the pond as they launched them out upon the deep. She even heard and heeded the changeable talk of the sparrows in the branches overhead, while their cousins of every degree dumpily hopped about her long feet with no more fear of casualties than if she were a dust-bin. And all the while some other Miss Miller sat tristfully hearkening to the distant murmur of a fall of water feeding the shallow pond.

  In the soft sweet air of that hot St Martin’s summer morning her small tear-stained visitor must by now have stood staring at her under the tent of the chestnut tree for at least two whole minutes. And then softly and suddenly Miss Miller turned her sharp, black, coal-box eyes, and the long drooping nose that hung between them, straight at the child.

  ‘Well, Rosie,’ she said, ‘and what’s for you?’