Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  Hilbert eyed him. Hans Andersen, indeed: the horsy creature was talking like a book.

  The immense bulbous hob-nailed boots were now less than half an inch from the edge of the platform. He appeared to be quite indifferent to an habitual danger. Indeed he turned and spat very carefully on to the track, then eyed his companion again. ‘She won’t keep you mooning much longer, sir,’ he reassured him. ‘You can hear her low-like humming on the metals like them evening bumbledores even when she’s a good three miles still to come.’

  He spat again, turned away, and his bow legs were steadily carrying him off. Hilbert had been listening, but only half heeding, he was so intent on the cavernous face. The next instant his mind had reverted to the ‘picture frame’, and to the tic-tac, and the iron rumour of the ‘she’ he was awaiting. How intensely odd – incredible! Why, one of his favourite chapters in his Parleyings had been all about birds – and in a prose he had fondly hoped was not wholly out of keeping with them. He had referred in it to William Davies’s unforgettable robin – ‘halfway up his legs in snow’ – to Lesbia’s sparrow, and Skelton’s too, but he had clean forgotten the wagtail – nimble Sallie Dishwasher – and had never himself even noticed her shadow; no, nor the tic-tac either. And if such little things as these were not at least on the way to poetry he was a Double Dutchman and deserved to write it in his native tongue. To think that Heaven should have consented to reward him so swiftly! The spring locks of his little bag flicked back with a spirited clap, his hand dived in, he clasped a copy of his Pegasus, grass-green as Flora’s mantle, and hastened after the porter.

  ‘Would you,’ he cried, a little breathlessly, calling after him, ‘accept this? A – a keepsake?’

  The porter turned, opened his mouth, and looked at the book – as if he were Robinson Crusoe contemplating a powder-puff that had been washed up on to his beach. Then he dusted his large right hand on his green corduroy trouser-leg, and held it out.

  ‘Why, sir,’ he said, ‘that’s an uncommon kind thought of yours, and very welcome too, I’m sure. My daughter, now; she’s none too clever in her intellects, poor dear. She’ll take a deal of pleasure in it, even though she keeps only to the covers. If there’s one thing that keeps her smiling, sir, it’s pretty colours. Green in particular. And eyes like hers, watching out quiet in the porch most fine mornings, don’t seem to cotton much to many words; though what she don’t say, sir, would be a sight better worth hearing than most.’

  ‘No,’ said Hilbert. ‘Yes, I mean.’ It was an awkward pause, but the porter did not seem to be indulging either in sentiment or irony. He continued to clasp the dainty little book between grimy finger and thumb as gently as Cupid a daisy; but found no more words to say. Conscious of looking a little hot, damp, and diffident, Hilbert nodded, smiled, and returned to shut his bag. One from four leaves only three, he announced to himself. The sum reminded him of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts, though he rejoiced that the wager he had made with himself did not entail his having to eat his little books.

  A peculiar faint drumming, as of a prodigious harp-string, had begun furtively to resound. The porter was ding-donging an old bell. ‘She,’ then, was probably not more than a mile away now. Yes, here she came, puffing out delirious clots of wool and advancing on the toy railway station as meditatively as a gigantic snail. If Hilbert took a few lessons from the porter at Bovey Fausset he might at last succeed in detecting her at double the distance. ‘Man’s senses,’ suddenly exclaimed a small dry voice from deep down beyond his sub-sub-consciousness, ‘man’s senses are his highway to the infinities.’ Hilbert determined to make a note of that. Meanwhile he was hoisting himself into his chosen compartment.

  When at last he had settled himself into his corner, and – his eye on the revolving scenery beyond the window – had paused long enough to make the survey a little more polite, he ventured to glance at his only companion. This old gentleman looked about seventy. He was frail but fibrous, and consisted of a series of narrow cylinders that were all but oblongs; a high, narrow head, a long, narrow body, and two right-angled legs in black trousers. His waistcoat was faintly speckled, and his little white cambric bow was like that of an old-fashioned waiter. He was reading a dumpy leather-bound book, and appeared to be as far away from the rocking clatter of his surroundings as a sleeping infant would be during a performance of Götterdämmerung.

  Did Jesuit priests ever wear speckled waistcoats? Hilbert didn’t know – indeed he knew very little about the society, though he had often coveted the privilege of meeting one of its members. They were always aware, he had somehow divined, of exactly what they were talking about. How motionlessly the old gentleman’s eyelids hung over his shuttling eyes. The lean-knuckled, blue-veined hand clasping the book never stirred. ‘Pious – no question,’ Hilbert was whispering to himself, ‘but a thoroughly good sort, I should guess. Austere, though. He looks,’ he added a moment afterwards, ‘as dry as an old biscuit.’ It might be exceedingly questionable manners – but dared he venture?

  Nothing venture, nothing win. And though the porter had been a purely gratuitous godsend, Hilbert couldn’t expect an average of one disposed-of volume every quarter of an hour, even though less than sixty minutes would see him home again.

  He leaned forward as winningly as might an uncommonly good-natured barmaid. ‘I am so very sorry, sir, to interrupt you, but could you tell me if this is the up train?’

  The old gentleman’s good angel first gently composed her wings; he himself then lifted his eyelids, lowered his book, and glanced at the young man – out of small, bright, blue-grey eyes, as keen as a kestrel’s. He watched him a moment, and a tiny wrinkle showed at the corner of one of them.

  ‘Up?’ he repeated. ‘Let me see. That’s going north, isn’t it? Yes, and the sun is descending on your side. Observe the shadows. I haven’t any doubt in the world we are both of us on our way up! And that, I sometimes endeavour to remind myself, is the way I once hoped to be going. Alas! I can be perilously absent-minded.’ He had smiled outright now, as if in private confabulation with his little jest. Still, there had been that in his ‘up’ and in the wintry twinkle that accompanied it, which had set Hilbert speculating. It was a kind of Sesame. He peered into the cavern thus revealed, and though he could see but a little way, evidently it was neatly kept. There was a vista. But had the old gentleman passed his test?

  Now, poetry, he was thinking to himself, depends at least in part on condensing, without, possibly, any clear excuse for it, a wide metaphorical view out of some tiny morsel of quite commonplace fact. ‘Bird thou never wert’, for example; and ‘Of his bones are coral made’. That being so, the up, surely, was just on the mark. This decision, however, left the question whether its author – who was in every line and accent and feature as unquestionably a firm believer in the virtues of a sound prose as the ‘Great Bear’ himself – could possibly care to accept what poor Hilbert was tempted there and then to label, say, a hybrid medium – his Parleyings? For both their sakes Hilbert wished to be considerate. But his fingers had already strayed towards the catch of his little brown bag.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘Very much indeed. It is always a – a relief to know, to be sure one is not in the wrong train – when travelling, I mean. But I am not a traveller in the other sense – not commercially, I mean, nor perhaps … It’s only that – well, that a friend of mine has suggested …’ His eye faltered and fell under the old gentleman’s steady scrutiny. ‘I was wondering, sir, if you would do me the kindness of accepting – this?’

  He snapped open his bag and withdrew the first copy that presented itself. ‘It’s – it’s only prose, even if that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You are exceedingly kind, sir,’ said the old gentleman, bestowing on Hilbert a formal but courteous nod of the head as he took the book between his lean old fingers. ‘Thank you. I am not a great reader, indeed have little leisure for it, but when the opportunity comes I shall be most happy to peruse the book.’
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  At which, heedless of the blush which he was aware had mantled his brow, Hilbert managed to retrieve his fib. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he blurted, ‘it was not exactly a friend. I – I mean – I, that is, am the author. It is’ – he had sighed in spite of himself – ‘it is my first – er – effort.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said the old gentleman. ‘That makes the gift doubly welcome. Until this moment we had never met, and now, in what remains of this life’ – he tapped the book with his finger – ‘we shall never be parted.’

  Goodness, Intelligence, and their younger sister, Courtesy – here, Hilbert decided, were the three Graces all at play in this one aged and quiet face; and, for Dorian porch to the temple within, those strait, keen lines between the eyes.

  For some little time, as his new acquaintance had at once resumed his reading, Hilbert sat watching the passing countryside – sheaves heavy with harvest in the stubble fields, green-feathered ‘roots’ in others; whirring flights of autumn birds. Another year was emptying itself away. We plough the fields – and scatter.

  ‘And now, in what remains of this life, we shall never be parted’ – well, if that was not a wholly non-prosaic welcome to a greenhorn little book from the trembling hands of a novice less than a third of one’s own age – well … Nevertheless Hilbert felt the least bit uneasy. Not at the difficulty of deciding whether what is non-prosaic is per se poetical; but because he had not confided to the old gentleman all the facts of the case. But while he was pondering on how delicate a task that might have proved, his head nodded, chin on chest, and he fell asleep.

  He awoke so sluggishly that he was aware of a voice declaiming on and on long before he had decided whether or not to open his eyes.

  ‘What I say is, treat ’em rough and ready and they’ll lick your boots. Pamper them, and they won’t give you not so much as a Thank-you. But no; Aggie never was the one to take advice. Never. Not her. In at one ear and out at the other; though, if she hasn’t had her lesson now – pretty heavy on the stomach and her whole life in ashes, as you might say – I’m not the one to rub the salt in. Straight up from the country, fare and all, that girl had come – somewhere from down Swindon way, so she said. And before she’d been in the house a week, in came m’lady from the Pictures at getting on for one in the morning with her No. 2 in young men beside her as large as life, and she, I give you my word, dressed up to the knocker and as bold as brass in Aggie’s blue hat and her best glassy kids. There – on her feet, mind you!’

  ‘Go on!’ murmured a second unseen speaker, apparently hampered with adenoids.

  ‘I should just about say she did go on! And her husband sitting there with his pipe between his teeth as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Not much. Swinging his legs and yawning his head off. And him reely and truly the founting head of all the trouble – brazen trollop. Not that I wouldn’t allow it was chiefly Aggie’s fault. As you make your bed in this world, so you must lay on it. Spoiled, that was what that girl was, like the one that had gone before her. Gas stove fresh from the works, Bristle’s sweeper, pink-edged kitchen crockery and a spring mattress all complete – I never heard the likes of it. What things are coming to I don’t know. What’s more, he defended her, put in his spoke, he did. “No more than a child; up from the country” – that kind of smooth-me-down. Child! Country! – ask me; a chit with rouge and lipstick all over her face, and that pasty-skinned you could have seen the smirk on her sly cat’s features without a candle in the dark!’

  ‘Go on! And that young feller and all!’

  ‘Yes, and so they did, all three of ’em, hammer and tongs, though as for him he was nothing but a blind and soon made himself scarce. As for what Aggie thought of that Albert of hers, she kept that for upstairs and the door shut – not for that baggage to be listening in to. A bit of her mind Aggie gave him, too, though I will say she hasn’t too much to spare. And when the pair of them come down next morning, lo and behold! nothing but what remained of the slut’s meat breakfast on the kitchen table – meat, mind you – and the girl herself gone, lock, stock, and barrel, and Aggie’s best set of real silk undies gone with her.’

  ‘Silk! Real! Lor’! I never! Go on!’

  ‘Nor didn’t Aggie. Fare paid and faked-up references, until I expect she’s got to Buckingham Palace by now – or Holloway. And that angelic-looking in spite of her sauce, you might have been staring straight into the Garden of Eden every time she opened her mouth.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Yes, and ask me, that’s what kept him quiet. Give a man a face to look at, and the devil himself might just as well throw in his checks for all what he thinks is nothing but envy and slander. That ended it. He couldn’t stand it any longer, and she went back to her mother, Aggie did, and to that poky upstairs dressmaking business all over again. But it’s that pore little Amy my heart bleeds for. Pore mite, with her saucer eyes shivering there on the brink! Better her daddy safe in his grave, if I had my choice! It’s my belief we’re here because we are put; and you might as well be a cabbage as think you have got any say about it. I never did hold with it, and never shall.’

  But this time the second unseen refrained from expressing any view at all. She hadn’t even invited her friend to ‘go on’.

  Hilbert, having rapidly attempted to digest this second-hand miscellaneous slice of human experience, opened his eyes and peered out in the direction of the voice at what now occupied the further corner of the carriage, whence alas, his tranquil old Jesuit, while he himself was dreaming, had silently departed. Thus motionless, he explored yet another stranger.

  She was a woman dressed up in what Hilbert supposed to be cretonne, and that of a bold and remarkable design, and she wore pink stockings. She had a long face and high knee bones, an eye like a suffering, if not long-suffering, and contemptuous hen, and a mouth that told an inexhaustible tale of inward woe and outward wailing. Beside her stood a tall gaping basket, woven of gaudy bast into a pattern that would intoxicate a Hottentot. Its maw gaped as omnivorously as a shark’s.

  Now Hilbert, above all things, wished to be fair – to himself, to his apple-green firstfruits, to humanity in general, and above all to the Muses. Possibly because the talk he had just heard had been poured into his ear while he sat between sleeping and waking, he could recall a good deal of it. And if style is the man himself, certainly its was a large part of this lady. Like a humble-bee in a garden, he hardly knew where to alight first. On Aggie’s blue hat or the devil’s checks? Or on the fat open-mouthed young blonde squatting squarely in front of her – concerning whom the merest fleeting glimpse had disclosed that she must have very few clothes on?

  Hilbert was frailly human enough too to be bowled over even by the most casual of references to the Garden of Eden, and he narrowed his inward eye a little at recollection of the ‘pore mite’s’ – little Amy’s – ‘brink’. He felt dis quieted. His chapter on ‘Images’ had suddenly in memory fallen a little flat. His old Jesuit had packed a lifetime into a word of two letters, the word ‘up’. Aggie’s friend preferred abandon, and so was far nearer the cauliflower in effect than the cabbage. But was there any connection between cauliflowers and poetry?

  What would Mrs Wilcox have said? Far too much, he was afraid. And already on nimble wing he had sped off to Matthew Arnold, to his ‘criticism of life’, and was reassured.

  In his precise pernickety fashion Hilbert had once been inquiring enough to look up this word ‘criticism’ in a formidable dictionary, and had then discovered that Matthew Arnold had by no means meant just criticism – niggling, gnawing, fretting, shredding, ravelling out, the activities of moth and rust – but discernment, insight. He had memorized the poet’s very words: ‘Criticism,’ he was gently repeating to himself, while a simmering silence continued to prevail between the two amazons now watchfully aware that the grey-flannel-suited young man in the corner was awake – ‘Criticism is a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’
But ‘the best’, mused Hilbert, surely, of its kind?

  He ventured on another peep at Aggie’s friend. And their glances met: a glance on the one side like a venomous dart from the blow-pipe of a man of Borneo, out of an eye bead-like, reddish, hot, and fiery, which had instantly transfixed as if with a needle his own round orb of a pale and pensive blue. It was Hilbert’s that faltered; but not before he had decided that of her kind she had lavished on him a draught not only black, but piping hot and strong.

  The heat, the violence, the conviction, the expansiveness of her remarks! That hugger-mugger stage, the domestic drama, the ferocity. Should he try poems, after all? ‘Go on!’ indeed. He would willingly have paid the full price for a middle stall in the front row of Covent Garden if only she would consent to go on in the same strain – until the end of his journey. And surely, wouldn’t sweet William, Swan of Avon, have simply revelled in her fumes? ‘Stay put!’ She! Never. But heavens alive! – the train was slowing up. The lady had swivelled round her henlike head straight at him, and had clutched at the handles of her basket as if in sheer defiance of the Universe. In another moment she would be gone – for ever. But meanwhile she was at it again.

  ‘What I say is, trewth’s trewth; and I don’t care what eavesdroppers perking their ears up in corners unbeknown and shamming doggo may have heard me. A woman may work her fingers to the bone for a man and him not so much as a Thank-you. But Aggie – she go back – never! Though she’s no more of what I should call female charm than a tallow candle.’

  She had risen; the train had stopped. There was no time now even for a word of congratulation, let alone a convincing decision. Aggie’s friend’s pink, loose-mouthed young companion had already squeezed lingeringly past his knees and was alighting. The bast bag yawned like Limbo a few inches under his nose. With a triumphant, contrite, glancing gaze up into the woman’s constricted visage, and with lightning rapidity, Hilbert opened his little bag, extracted yet one more copy of the Parleyings – his third – and slipped it in. Could enterprise go further?