Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  But even if, in the abundance of her maternal heart, Hilbert’s mother had acquired those nineteen copies, a little discreet questioning soon showed that she could not possibly have read them all. ‘Knowing my precious boy, as I do,’ she had assured him, ‘there’s no need to study the book. Why, darling, I might have made up every word of it myself – though I should never have thought of the title! Let me see, in which story of Charles Dickens is it that that poor old Mr Pegasus is drowned?’

  It needed only Hilbert’s mastery of arithmetic to calculate that he had thus been left with twenty-four copies in all – copies stranded, as he feared, high and dry. So having decided that since the mountain showed no symptom of coming to Mahomet, Mahomet had better make the first advances, at intervals of a few days he had sallied out with the little brown bag which now shared with him the autumnal sunshine of his painted bench, and had already managed to dispose of ten of them. One on the seat of a bus, two in the corner of a tram, four on the shelves of an unsuspecting second-hand bookseller, one on the verger – a widower – of St Swithin’s, who left it by an oversight on the lectern, one on the counter of an obscure haberdasher’s shop, and two (in late dusk) pushed through a dentist’s letter-box. Like the young Benjamin Disraeli, all in his finery and plush, and facing a discordant House, Hilbert had muttered to himself: ‘Some day they shall read me.’ By which he meant the fastidious few. The degradation of becoming a bestseller had never even in fancy so much as darkened his mind.

  Thus it came about that he had this morning set out bound for a quarry a little farther afield – a populous town that boasted no fewer than three booksellers – a town, it seemed, pining for sweetness and light. Nevertheless he had twice failed to sell a copy of his Parleyings, in spite of offering a very liberal discount. And the third bookseller was so barbarous in appearance that he had not even made the attempt. So he had given it to the boy.

  Indeed, when it came to a question of acquiring a stock-in-trade rather than of disposing of one, booksellers as a species appeared to be singularly busy and absent-minded men. They would palm off on you a complete encyclopaedia in chaste morocco without turning a hair; whereas the very notion of purchasing even one copy of a bibelot seemed to threaten insolvency. To get the slightest attention from Mr A – a man with thick and powerful spectacles precariously perched on a broken nose – Hilbert had been compelled to buy a second-hand copy in purple leather of Poems of Passion by Ella Wheeler Wilcox – even though in business transactions passion is anathema and, unlike Sappho, Mrs Wilcox had always left him cold.

  With Mr B, on the other hand, a little fussy man with a somewhat ragged black moustache, the purchase of a shilling shocker had sufficed, Hilbert having no further stomach left for a rival wooer of the Muses. In spite of the profit thus to be derived, neither Mr A nor Mr B had consented to accept his commission. ‘If you will leave a copy with me, sir, I will look it over and let you know,’ had been their reply – and in almost identical terms. And Hilbert had with difficulty resisted the temptation to don a false beard, return to the shop and persuade this busy B to sell him his particular copy before he had had time to be as good as his word.

  Outside B’s rather musty little shop Hilbert’s four-year-old Austin Seven, as if in umbrage at her master’s ill-fortune, had decided that she needed a rest-cure, and the railway had proved to be his quickest way home. Nevertheless every ounce of Hilbert’s moral fibre and better nature had revolted at the notion of his ignominiously returning home with his four unwanteds. But how dispose of them? After all, Parleyings with Pegasus was his first born. Mere paternal affection alone shunned the temptation of leaving his offspring under the seat. It was of course his infants, not his literary masterpieces, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had abandoned. There are degrees of consciencelessness.

  What then was the alternative? Tracts being obsolete, the only literature nowadays bestowed gratis is the circular. There are Philistines who resent even these. It is a sad fact, Hilbert mused, that human nature should suspect a taint in anything that is given away – unless it is accompanied by tea or tobacco. The cost of circulars, he supposed, worked out at about ten a penny; whereas every single 3s. 6d. copy of his Parleyings had cost his mother 10s. 11.375d. net. He had done the sum himself.

  Nonetheless, the frigidity of Messrs A and B had only fanned the flame of his enthusiasm. In spite of all such rebuffs Hilbert had made no attempt to unbridle his Pegasus. There was plenty of sugar where the Parleyings had come from; and some day – Some Day – he would find himself in the saddle cantering gaily off to Mt Helicon. Nothing could exceed his assurance of this. Ever since he had been a fat little boy with flaxen finger-curls he had had a passion – undiluted, ineradicable – for putting himself into words – the very best words in the very best order.

  So had William Shakespeare. Why, at this very moment there was scarcely an object around him which was not pleading for its real right setting: The flaunting sunflower at the platform’s brink; The spidery arch that spans the wayside track; Sadly I sat while Autumn’s furtive rust. Whithersoever his eye roamed his vocabulary coyly responded. Mots justes, like midges, fairly danced in his mind. Hilbert had quite recently decided that his next volume should be in verse: a poetry book. This would, he knew, be shockingly out of fashion. Rhymes were gone; punctuation was gone; verse, free or otherwise, need not nowadays even trouble to scan. But then stops for Hilbert had always been a stumbling-block, and their absence does, of course, keep any kind of verse from reading like mere prose. While as for rhymes, even a Petrarchan sonnet per morning would be child’s play without them. He would defer his decision concerning these little trifles, in the assurance that he could dispense with them at a moment’s notice.

  He could, too, no less safely postpone any premature effort to put his political views into verse, until at any rate he had discovered what these were. At present any such phrase as Propaganda for the Amelioration and Solidarization of the Proletariat positively scared him. It sounded as if life were made of the spongiest india-rubber. Were even the Muses nowadays no better than bourgeoisie? He pined to be clear about such things; but might nonetheless in a year or two fall back on being obscure if, meanwhile, other means of self-communication had failed him.

  Then, too, there was what was called the Problem of Sex. From infancy Hilbert had fought shy of problems. And this one? Could he not when necessary take it in his poetic stride? Freud, after all, was only a foreigner; and his obsession one concerning which, he fancied – a flush suffusing his cheek the while – if only he consented to delve a little, he was himself less ignorant than un-‘knowing’. There were candid Manuals, of course. The broken-nosed Mr A had laid in a pile of them. And he had a friend … Besides, he had often vaguely felt that so far at least as his notion of poetry was concerned, Sex – with the capital, that is – was very little better than a dubious cul-de-sac. The further you went in the longer it took you to get out. Anyway a blind alley – like one’s appendix. Caecum, wasn’t it called, which, provided that it just functions in the usual way – what hideous words they secreted! – mattered no more than any other human requisite. One’s brains, say. What’s more, he was pretty confident that until any crisis came, as with one’s poor vermiform appendix itself, there was no need to have it out – no, not with anybody! There was no need at any rate for in decent haste. Besides, as yet, he felt, he couldn’t think very badly about life – not as yet. It had not at any rate proved itself to be a positive sink – of anything. Why not, then, repose for a little while upon the future? The murmurous, heavy-bosomed sunflowers languishing at him from across the gleaming metals exhibited not the faintest hint of haste.

  By and large, in fact, Hilbert was conscious at this serene and happy moment of no particular urge or vocation to become a ‘modern’ poet – even if he could manage the technique. And that, of course, brought him back to the question whether poetry – of any kind even – was really wanted. Had it of recent years become a mere luxury, a sort of
literary cosmetic? It certainly sometimes seemed so. And yet, in spite of mercenary booksellers, tepid reviewers, an invidious aunt, and retired uncles whose staple topic of conversation at afternoon tea was the moral necessity for a young man to be self-supporting, Hilbert didn’t believe it. There must be many Hilberts still carrying on the smouldering torch! He had lived, comparatively speaking, laborious days. He had seldom toyed with any Neaera’s hair. His electric lamp could frequently be seen burning long after midnight. When engaged in polishing his pensées had he not frequently even forgotten to touch his morning’s glass of milk?: ‘I’m sure, Hilbert dear, it’s very unwise to compose even poetry on an empty stomach.’ Why then had he failed? And here – not twelve inches away – was Mrs Wilcox in limp leather pleading to answer his questions! Passionately pleading. But, passionately or otherwise, he refused to pay her the faintest attention.

  Anyhow, his own answer was No – a thousand times, No! This England had not forsworn herself, and not even calling her Britain would make her. Nothing should ever shake his rooted conviction that every boy and every gal that’s born into this world alive must in due season and if given the opportunity, take to rhymes – and maybe even to vers libre – as naturally as a duck to water – or rather, as kittens take to cream. He had himself. Why, for centuries past every Society Beauty, every prime minister even, must have been bred up on Goosey Gander; and was there a labour leader in the land who had not taken Little Jack Horner to heart before he was five? It must be these sterilized, fossilized old grown-ups who are the offenders. Like William pears, humanity is apt to go sleepy with age, and no doubt it is education that is to blame. All ruts. A diet of indigestible facts – husks. What wonder we were all so repulsively alike? Possibly if nobody had been educated, the demand for poetry, and incidentally for his Parleyings, might have …

  Here Hilbert paused. But he was not going to betray his sense of truth by any appeal to his own vanity. He would stick to his point. As scores of lady authors, and many of them titled lady authors, were continually proclaiming in the newspapers, every adult who has fallen in love, or felt homesick, or smiled at an infant, or bowed to the new moon – and what human crustacean can have evaded the complete quartet? – has momentarily at the least been a poet, however much he might resent the charge if he were challenged. Had he not seen his own family butcher – his right hand nonchalantly clasping a black three-cornered knife, its point embedded in his block – gazing pensively on and on out of his shop at the sunset, just as if the ensanguined clouds dappling the blue were as much of his own make as was the necklet of sausages dangling behind him on its rack?

  No: Hilbert had complete faith in his fellow-creatures – a remnant at any rate; and here and now he was going to prove it justified. Why, of course, one can’t ‘make’ poets, since every human being is thus by Nature ready made! This inspiring thought had actually and instantly brought him to his feet, bag in hand, though the signal was still steadily against him. He took a pace or two and sat down again, but only because he fancied the porter who a moment before had peered out of a little den at the other end of the other platform had heard his footsteps. His blue eyes glistened, his cheek paled a little. So swiftly the imagination flies that Hilbert had already betted himself an even five shillings that he would prove his thesis four times over before he got home that evening.

  What is more, he vowed that if he failed, say, twice – no, say, thrice out of the four, he would give up all hope of Pegasus altogether. He would buy a sixpenny padlock and lock the stable up. He would let grass grow between its cobbles and house-leeks on its tiles. And it wouldn’t matter a bit if now and then silly sentiment should persuade him to sit and snuff the equine atmosphere, to watch the sparrows, and to overhear an occasional thud of hoof on brick, or rattle of manger rope. For since Pegasuses are immortal, not even the S.P.C.A. could inquire why you had immured one particular specimen out of the light of the morning and had not even supplied it with a bottle of old hay.

  It was the simplest thing in the world, this project of Hilbert’s. He had already dabbled in the experiment. It was merely, for one brief afternoon, to play Paul Pry to the world at large. Englishmen (he wasn’t quite so certain about Englishwomen) are so unaccustomed to talking to strangers that when they do, they are far more inclined to ease their hearts of all their ills, to say out really what they not only mean but feel – to confide, to confess, to tell secrets. And once the heart itself begins to talk – you simply cannot help it – poetry, just its gold dust, is bound to follow. Your tongue takes to itself cadences, tunes, even metres which are positively lyrical! That is why money-lenders, stockbrokers, schoolmasters, bookmakers, and most officials are so prosaic – they live in their heads and abandon their feelings. Who ever heard of a tax-inspector or a gas collector making up rhymes? Why did cabinet ministers so seldom resort in their speeches to blank verse? Simply because their hearts were not in their work.

  ‘Emotion remembered in tranquillity’ – yes, at his very first chance Hilbert would get the beggars to talk – of their feelings, of their pasts – preferably of their hidden pasts. Then he would wait. And the very first syllable which even a neutral would agree so much as hinted that the speaker had even the slightest claim to be representative of the tiny island that had been responsible for the greatest, noblest, deepest, oddest, crankiest, imaginativest, essentialest poetry in the whole history of the world – the very moment those lips, bucolic or otherwise, audibly proved themselves to have been even touched with (even a fading cinder of) the divine fire, well, that would be a definite proof of Hilbert’s thesis. And for immediate reward out would come one of the four copies of his Parleyings now reposing in his bag, and the first quarter, the first twenty-five per cent (as Messrs A and B would prefer to call it) of his good deed for the day would have been done.

  It is true, of course, that poetry needs no reward. But does even the poet himself need a Neaera if he is already in blissful possession of an Amaryllis? And it was not until a full moment after this happy metaphor had occurred to him that Hilbert wondered if it had any bearing on his argument.

  He might, of course, encounter only Scotchmen. And they, in spite of being the strident sponsors of Burns and other local bards, are so thrifty by nature that they appear in general to keep to statements like ‘Ech,’ or ‘Ye dinna,’ or ‘Och, mon.’ Whereas Irishmen delight in blarney, and have a poetry all their own. As for the Welsh, well, Hilbert had never really penetrated, so to speak, beneath the beards of the Druids. He would, then, have to be cautious.

  But what a lark it would be! From first to last in his experiences of private publishing he had never dreamed of such a reward. What’s more, there was charity in it. He was going to give – even to give himself – away!

  Yet again that distant porter had peered out of his lair in his direction. No doubt he was looking for the 4.10. And rightly so, since at this moment it was 4.44; and perhaps he wanted his tea. So did Hilbert. But he had been so intent on other cravings that he had failed to notice it. This time, however, the porter had not gone in again; on the contrary, he was sallying out. Why, thought Hilbert, watching him, is a green-glassed lantern so magical an object in full daylight? Was it because, like poetry itself, it is of no immediate use? And why, in a dear mediaeval little wayside station like this, where heavy luggage must be scarce, had the porter bow legs?

  He was crossing the line, lantern in hand, as blindly and deliberately as even Destiny paces on. And Hilbert, as childishly as ever, loved crossing the line. He envied him. And, yes – he was coming this way. How awful! Hilbert was so utterly isolated that he would be morally bound to speak to him, and that might entail a protracted conversation. He had yet again realized that he detested talking to strangers. Or, rather, he detested the thought of talking to strangers; particularly strangers engaged in really practical occupations – ploughmen, carpenters, hedgers and ditchers, grooms, plumbers. They always made him feel so absurdly ignorant and what is called supererogato
ry. Well, one thing, the porter’s peculiar fiddle-face resembled a sexton’s lantern, he was well over middle age, and looked rheumatic and taciturn.

  ‘What a lovely afternoon!’ exclaimed Hilbert. The porter slowly and cautiously surveyed his surroundings, high and low. He reminded Hilbert of a bivalve at taste of salt water gently chinkening open its shell.

  ‘It is that, sir,’ he replied at length. ‘We usually get this kind of weather here.’

  ‘Really!’ said Hilbert. ‘Really! Perhaps one doesn’t notice it enough. Of course, as it’s so very quiet – I mean when there are no trains about …’

  ‘Ay,’ said the porter, his black eyes firmly fixed on the almost maidenly smile of the young man, ‘ay, that’s part of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hilbert.

  ‘Quiet!’ repeated the porter. ‘There was a gennelman here not long ago who said that looking under that bridge was like a picture frame. And if you make allowances, sir, so it is. Sometimes it’s just the same; and sometimes it’s quite different.’

  Hilbert stooped a little to peer through under the bridge – green-bright meadows, changing woods, the distant hill. But so dark, so vacantly pitched were the eyes of the porter as he surveyed it himself that Hilbert refrained even from nodding his head.

  ‘Quiet!’ repeated the porter. ‘Look at them sparrows there. You can sometimes catch the tic-tac of their claws on the metals as they hop it over.’

  Hilbert listened. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t.’

  The porter smiled – a slow, tranquil smile, like the shifting chequer of leaves on a tomb in a churchyard. ‘You have only just come, sir,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it’s time as does it. But what, now, they varmints pick up among them flints,’ he continued, ‘considering I’ve never seen nobody much feeding hereabouts, needs an eye I’ve never got. And I’ve watched ’em hours at a stretch till I’ve felt my own nose sharpening. I expex they know best. But when it comes to they pied wagtails after the flies! Tic-tac? Not them. Lor’ bless you, they are that dainty and easy in the air you’d think they’d gone to school to their own shadows.’