Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  He himself bragged about it in confessing it. He even sneered at the episode and dismissed it scoffingly as a childish amour. But he owned nonetheless that the shock when he was sixteen on hearing that she was married nearly threw him into convulsions. Convulsions!

  Nor need any such infatuation be concerned with another child. A friend of mine once confided in me that when he was a boy not yet in his teens he used to spend hours loafing on an old brick wall hidden under the branches of a wild-cherry tree merely in hope of catching a glimpse of the fair-haired widow who lived near-by – a young woman of twenty-eight! Naturally, he ‘never told his love’ – never, romantic imp, referred to the worm in the bud – until it didn’t matter, and, too precocious in much the same degree, he didn’t matter either, having become a juvenile roué.

  The blossom of the wild cherry is as delicate as hoar frost, and as cool and beautiful as snow; but there is not much else to be said for it, nor for its tart hard berry, except possibly by the birds. And theirs seemingly are songs without words.

  Well, I have a similar memory.

  Like most children, I delighted in the old, fabulous fantastic stories – Grimm’s, Hans Andersen’s, the Arabian Nights. I loved old houses too, and particularly houses that appeared to be ‘haunted’ – even if tales about them might send me shivering to bed.

  And once, a lifetime ago, I managed to combine all these absurd fancies in one expedition. Not that it proved to be a triumph – even for la belle Dame! But for all that, memories, ‘silly’ remembrances of this kind need not fade, or die, in our hands. Nor need they leave immitigable regrets behind them.

  At the time I am speaking of I can have been at the most only on the edge of my teens; and young too (as well perhaps as a little precocious) for my age. My mother had died when I was five, and after that I had been left pretty much to myself. We were living in Scotland, in Inverness-shire, in an old and rather ugly house. A desolate-looking scene stretched out beneath its windows, especially when one flattened one’s nose against the glass and peered out on it through the frequent Scotch mists. But familiarity may breed affection. The house was only rented, alas! A lonely spot.

  I had been at a loose end during those particular summer holidays, and had done badly in my schoolwork. To keep out of view of my father’s challenging or aggrieved eye for as long as I could, I used to rove about over the moors, indulging in fantastic day-dreams, and yet pining for company. In a mystified fashion too I was looking for something. There was a method in my meanderings. The something was a house, and the house had a story attached to it.

  Not that at this time I actually knew its story. But the few crumbs of it which I had picked up by chance, in the kitchen, or while listening to the casual talk of my elders, had fed many a companion-less hour. I had more than once even dreamed of the house, and at least believed that it was haunted. The word itself of course suggests old, solitary, and ruinous masses of unpruned ivy; owls, the banshee, a spectral moon in a scudding sky. Well, there was nothing of that in my head.

  On the contrary … It was a Sunday morning in summer when I first chanced on the house, having yet again managed to evade kirk. There was no mistaking it. Its name was enwreathed in the foliations of its wrought-iron gates. It was a still and clear day, I remember; of a full but gentle sunshine. The house had a solitary and beautiful situation – hill and valley. At the back of it, and not a stone’s-throw away, cascaded a mountain stream, full and deep after rain, and at all times with a natural fall of water upon rocks fifteen or twenty feet below. This fill made a low continuous musical roar, like that of jangling bells and voices. It reverberated the whole day long.

  The house belonged, as I knew, to a princess, an Oriental princess, and therefore, as I supposed, a dusky one, from India, perhaps, Ceylon, Siam, somewhere in the East. (I hadn’t realized that one might be just such a princess and yet – well, as pale as a narcissus – the narcissus poeticus even!) No board announced that the house was to be let. No temporary tenant, I understood, had ever rented it. Yet she herself, the princess, hadn’t been near it for years. For how many years, I hadn’t the faintest notion. Certainly it looked mute and vacant enough. A tragedy, a love tragedy, the story went, had exiled its owner. Faces had fallen glum, and tongues discreet, whenever I had heard it mentioned.

  But putting two and two together, and making twenty-one of them, as a child will, I had come to the conclusion, (a) that my princess had been as lovely as the Queen of Sheba (and it was King Solomon who was wise); (b) younger than this queen; (c) that she had in her brief life always been forlorn and solitary – a Mariana in a moated grange; and (d) that she was dead! I was reluctant to be certain of this. And yet, she must be dead, I fancied, for so only could I keep my romantic notions of her safe. And yet in a foolish fashion, I hoped, not. On the other hand, was not the house said to be haunted; so couldn’t I make the best of both worlds? You will guess what I mean.

  These ruminations, at any rate, had turned the princess into a sort of dream-creature, all my own; something ineffably lovely that only the young are capable of creating, although it is the business of poets, I suppose, to attempt it. And romantic? Well, isn’t that the only true meaning of the word? Indeed, ridiculous though it may sound, in those greenhorn days I too had fallen in love – sucking-calf-love – and with a phantom!

  Meanwhile, there I stood, steadily surveying the house; fascinated, but a little repelled. Was it occupied? Most of the windows were shuttered; a few of the upper ones were only curtained. Who and what, I wondered, might not have taken up a lodging here? There was a look of neglect, of the distraught, but it was not extreme. Moss, damp, discolouration, weather and season would account for much of that. And you could tell at a glance that the place had never been a happily peopled house; not at any rate in recent years. In a word, it looked abandoned. And the very effect of the air surrounding it changes when a house had been abandoned. Humans are like that too.

  There, in the shelter of a tree, I stood watching the house; drew nearer at length, paused under its porch, and listened. Not a whisper. Only the answer that silence gives. So I made my way to the back of the house; found a little unlatched green door; listened again, but could hear nothing except the noise of falling water and a faint shrill grasshopper-like trilling – like the twittering of birds, in the reeds and bushes of a stream.

  Sunshine was pouring down; and, as for solitude, I might have been in the middle of the Desert of Gobi. I pushed the door gently inwards and took a look at the beyond. A stone-flagged passage evidently led into the kitchen quarters. I looked and listened – no clink of pan or clack of pot, no sizzling; not the faintest whiff of cooking on the air; only the mouldy and fusty. I ventured on. An old-fashioned meat-jack resembling the upper parts of a knight in armour stood in the kitchen. There was a gigantic table; heavy chairs, a gravy spoon, a rusty knife, and a stopped clock. No fire and a stopped clock! Well, anyhow, the cook was not at home!

  Upstairs I stole at last, led onward by the phantom shape in my imagination; the dusky skin, the deep-memoried forlorn dark eyes. She haunted me; but my young fancy had done its best for her! At the end of a long corridor I came to a door ajar. All the rest had been shut. At this door I paused again. It had pretty coloured panels and a cut-glass handle. I looked in. I even had the audacity to draw back a folding shutter so that the sunshine should enter. No room I had ever seen at that time resembled it; a low-pitched moulded ceiling, deep, rich colours and embroideries, what I know now were Persian tiles and dishes; and a few pictures, by the then unfashionable French painters. Nothing Indian; no brazen goddesses, tusks, elephant-pads, carved ivories, mother-of-pearl. And no sound but those of the water – hollow, musical, in a strange but enchanting tongue.

  The room was a sort of boudoir, I fancied, and nothing was amiss with it except only that the finest dust faintly veiled the tables and obscured the glass. And opposite the window in the sunlight there hung on the wall a portrait. Whose, I knew instantly. That t
he princess of my imagination had been dark and young and beautiful – there was nothing unlikely in that. But, except for no hint of duskiness in the pallor of the cheek, how strangely close a resemblance was here! I myself might have painted the portrait.

  The forlorn dark eyes gazed steadily back at me, sharing, or at least understanding, as it seemed, my foolish boyish dreams. If a poem can be said to resemble a quiet and lovely face, then this face resembled a poem. It was suffused with its own imaginations. How many leagues my astral body flitted away at that moment I will not venture to compute. A faint sound from below, scamper of mouse or rat perhaps, recalled me to the predicament I should be in if I were caught. Well, I stole away no less cautiously than I had come, and mentioned my discovery to not a single soul …

  More comforting than a ghost, I had seen the very image of the dreamed-of one. It was as if I had trespassed into some tale in the Arabian Nights – an abode of beauty and danger. One thing; I was no longer in doubt that my princess was dead. But Time, I was to learn, has other means of sepulture than the grave …

  It was winter and very cold when I came again to the house – an afternoon in January. Ice had diminished the roar of the waterfall, and there were no warblers now; only, among the hills, the crying of peewits. I approached the house from the back, this time from over the moor, an empty waste of virgin snow. There was a small winter sun burning clear in the sky, but with little heat – more like a lantern, and low towards the south. It had less than an hour to shine, I reckoned, before its setting. Splintery crystals of hoar frost shimmered on the green-blue paint of the door. It was even colder inside the house; and quiet as a tomb. Too quiet.

  As if with the instinct of an animal, I suspected that this time I was not its only inmate. For a full two minutes I must have stood listening at the door of the room in the upper corridor. Yet at first glance within, all was well. The shutter lay open as I had left it; although now there was no direct sunshine – only on walls and ceiling a stark bleak unearthly brightness reflected from the snow.

  It will hardly be credited, but such was the folly of my young heart, that I had actually brought with me a bunch of early snowdrops; and, as it proved, I could hardly have made a less appropriate choice. In this cold bright silence I turned at once towards the portrait, as if for a welcome, and then, to my consternation, noticed that the door into the inner room was ajar.

  I stole over to a window; and there, black as ink beneath it, stood drawn up to the porch a four-wheeled cab, the superannuated old horse between the shafts apparently asleep, and of a dirty yellowish white against the snow. I stared at it in dismay. And as I stood watching, there came a faint silken rustling, the whiff of an exotic scent, and, like a creature caught in a trap, I turned.

  Pallid and painted, lean as a starving cat, and dressed up to the nines, stood in the doorway of the room beyond, the figure of a thin-nosed, haggard old woman, her black eyes fixed intently on me. In that spectral snow light I was for an instant or two uncertain whether she was actual or an illusion. Motionless in her finery, with fixed sidelong head and starch-white face, she might have been a life-sized marionette, grotesque but intimidating. Besides, there are, in all of us, degrees of reality; and she appeared to have been ‘made up’, in more senses than one. As to being an illusion she soon undeceived me. Nodding her head as she spoke, and in a voice resembling the jangling of strings in some old thumped-on, worn-out, school-room piano, she said:

  ‘How do you do? I fear you have had a cold welcome.’

  I made no reply. She then asked me who I was, and how I had found my way into the house. Mortally alarmed of her, I muttered my name and explained where I had come from. She then inquired what I had come for. And that for the moment stumped me.

  ‘For what you can find, I suppose,’ she jeered. ‘Well, my young man, even magpies have tongues. Whatever else you may think covetable here, you won’t discover anything to eat. That I can warrant.’

  Her old rouged sallow cheeks puckered up into a grin. She nodded at the snowdrops in my hand.

  ‘What are those for?’ she asked me.

  The knowledge that in my embarrassment my face must have gone red as a beetroot only made me the more timid and disinclined to answer her. I said I had brought them for someone.

  ‘“Some one?” Some one here?’ she retorted sharply. ‘Who? When?’

  I turned a faltering head, glanced up at the portrait on the wall; and then, still speechless, fixed my eyes on herself again.

  ‘For that?’ she cried. ‘For her?’ There was no mistaking her astonishment. ‘Well! And you expect me, my young gentleman, to believe it! Flowers for a picture! A pretty story – even if it is untrue. And who do you suppose that is?’

  I had heard, I explained, of a princess who had once lived in the house. My father had talked of her, and the servants. The features of the jaded old face set into a stare and the black eyes seemed to pierce me to the marrow.

  ‘A princess, eh? And what kind of a princess, may I ask?’

  I told her that I thought she had come from the East.

  ‘And gone to?’

  ‘I supposed,’ I said, ‘that she was…’ Then I paused.

  ‘Well? That she was? That she was – what?’

  ‘Dead,’ I replied; and hung my head.

  I cannot describe the precise change in her face at this announcement. Certainly no resentment showed in it. Indeed, for a moment its peevishness seemed to drain away out of it, and much, too, even of its age and its sardonicism. Another face, from out of the past, had been faintly disclosed. It seems strange that at that moment I did not realize whose.

  ‘Oh, “dead”,’ she repeated. ‘So the princess is dead? That’s what they all say, is it? Convenient. But not much of a compliment, do you suppose? And what did you think this princess of yours would look like – well, if she was dead?’ I ignored the sinister hint in the question, yet was momentarily fascinated by it. I merely nodded again towards the picture.

  ‘Like that,’ I replied.

  ‘Very naïve, and charming. Prettiness itself,’ she scoffed. ‘A secret assignation? But, if, my young stranger, the young lady was dead, who did you suppose was going to keep the tryst?’

  The old creature’s eyes fixed themselves even a shade more intently on my silent face. ‘A ghost, I suppose? … So that’s it?’

  I shook my head, and had just enough courage to add, ‘I don’t think I should have been frightened.’

  ‘Not frightened, eh?’ she mocked me. ‘Not at a ghost? Quite a little Sir Galahad! And do you flatter yourself that you didn’t look more than a little frightened when you saw me? Bless you, child, the bloom went out of your cheeks – like that. As if you had gulped down a dose of physic – castor oil. But perhaps you supposed that I was a ghost?’

  There fell again a silence between us. Unless it were fancy, the waterfall had slightly changed its note. The frost, then, was deepening. The quiet lovely room was cold and still as a vault. I continued to gaze at my questioner, my hands clammy, my eyes like a bird’s in the spell of a serpent.

  ‘At first, perhaps, I did think you were a ghost,’ I managed to blurt out at last. ‘I wasn’t sure what you were. Not at first. It startled me.’

  ‘It, eh? At first? But when you discovered that I was … well, flesh and – and bone, what then? You were still more frightened?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I lied; and added quickly to muffle the lie up, ‘except at being caught here.’

  ‘I see,’ she mocked meditatively. ‘And the snowdrops? Were they to be an offering to the paint, or to the spectre?’

  Again I shook my head. ‘I was only going to leave them,’ I said.

  ‘Quite a little romance! Train up the child in the way that he should go. Don’t be alarmed. We all have to begin like that. But for the life of me I cannot make up my mind whether our little housebreaker is extremely backward for his age, or atrociously forward. How old are you?’

  ‘Speak up,’ she said, w
hen I had answered. ‘You need not be as frightened of me as all that. Perhaps you would like a pretty little vase for your posy and some nice cold water? Gracious heavens, try to come alive, boy! I could never abide day-dreamers.’

  By now I was ready to burst with misery, rage, and shame. And she saw it. Her face softened a little. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘you can comfort yourself with one thing: I don’t tell tales. I may resemble an old parrot; but I don’t tell tales. Never did. I leave that to others.’ She had seated herself at the table.

  ‘Come here and shake hands on it.’ The last of dusklight was beginning to drain out of the room; a paler, more furtive radiance was stealing in. I hesitated, went over, and held out my hand.

  ‘God bless the boy,’ she cried, ‘has he no manners! I warrant now, if that young lady had been sitting here, you wouldn’t have put out a lifeless paw to shake hands with. Not so much of a little Platonist as all that!’ She had tugged off a needlework glove and had thrust out a blue-veined claw of a hand towards me. Its bony fingers were three deep with old rings. ‘There,’ she announced, ‘since I haven’t a mince-pie or a slice of cake to offer you, taste that!’

  With infinite disinclination I did as she had bidden me, and kissed her cold lean hand.

  ‘So you fancied your lady-love was dead – our innocent adorable nymph up there, of the sidelong look and downward glance! And now, boy, for a little secret. But this, mind you, is not for the servants!’ She waited, staring at me, her head slightly trembling on her old shoulders. ‘Well, there are two kinds of ghosts. We may compare them to a nut. The one kind is the kernel. The other is the husk. At this moment you are contemplating the husk. Do I look it? Do I look that kind of ghost? Do I look – well, dead?’

  God only knows I had never encountered a human being before that in some respects looked less dead, and yet so perilously near it. I turned my head away to hide the distress and aversion in my eyes; and then, such is childhood, I thrust the bunch of snowdrops into one pocket of my jacket, pulled out a dingy handkerchief from the other, and began to cry. The old woman waited until I had pushed back the handkerchief by faltering inches into my pocket again.