Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘I was terrified, and in acute distress. In the faint, dusky light, I could see that there was a very fine sand on the floor, and a few old broken or derelict relics of objects which I couldn’t distinguish – sacred furniture and images, I suppose. The place appeared to have been rifled; but there was no trace, as far as I can recall, of any sarcophagus or of any mummy, although some sort of both presumably there must once have been. Was I the mummy?

  ‘The sand was of the finest dust on the stony floor, and the walls were arabesqued with inscriptions – flowers, figures, serpents and so forth. I was only vaguely aware of this, for my attention had become fixed on one small oblong lozenge-shaped hieroglyphic or cartouche.

  ‘As you know, a cartouche usually contains the characters of some sovereign’s name; Cleopatra’s has two birds in it – heads to the west – as indeed hers finally was! Apart from this there was no other design that I can recall on the stone ceiling over my head. Where the light was coming from I cannot say; in sleep perhaps our own eyes supply it, like a cat’s. The characters in the cartouche resembled, left to right, first a crouching animal with a child’s face; tiny, I surmise, of course, but greatly dream-magnified. It was also very lovely. Next, there was a tree – a willow or weeping ash, something of that kind; and next to that, and partly under it, stood what appeared to be a box or chest or tomb with a rounded top – of the shape of a sarcophagus but much smaller. There was even a sort of sullen glitter from the precious stones with which it had been inlaid – although, as I say, this was only a representation of it. I realized that it had once contained the vital parts of some inmate, the heart, viscera and so forth; but that now it was empty. The astonishing thing is that I knew in my dream perfectly well what all these emblems stood for and what they signified. A desperate cankering grief for one thing – the weeping willow. An inward descent towards death. It was as if the past had resolved itself into this tiny esoteric pattern and that I could grasp it in an instant of time, and interpret its every single syllable as briefly. “The secrets of all hearts”, my dear. But that was in the dream.’

  Mrs Millington had been so intent on this fantastic and muddled narrative that she had hardly stirred since her husband had begun to relate it. But although a dream, so comparatively commonplace, could hardly be the cause of her repressed excitement, it was almost as if in entreaty or reproach that she put her next question: ‘William, you aren’t making all this up? You aren’t playing with me? It was a dream?’

  ‘I am telling you everything precisely as I recall it,’ was his reply. ‘But listen; you must await the sequel. That is what is going to be my real little difficulty. And I shall feel all the better when it is over. All that was just the dream. What, when I woke, I knew, or at any rate supposed, to be the meaning of the emblems, of the complete design of the cartouche – and please don’t scoff – was just this and only this. It meant, “It was Here”. “It happened Here”. Although I hadn’t the faintest conception what! It sounds ludicrous, but that was absolutely all. But although as is the way with dreams, I took it to be a sort of personal and private message or communication, it must merely have referred of course to the unhappy fate, the destiny – who knows what? – of the poor creature, the mummy that had been interred there, in its stony sepulchre. At least so one may surmise. Well, so much for the dream.’

  The ageing face, again turned sidelong and away from her, looked fagged and colourless and depressed, as if it were still in some degree enslaved by a mere illusion; and the eyes in it were once more fixed upon the ceiling overhead, although this appeared to be completely unintentional and innocent of any design. Once more untidy tufts of grizzled hair were showing grotesquely above the darkened leather of the chair and the awkward contents of it resembling an old-fashioned tailor’s dummy partially dismembered. Not that the owner of them would have been concerned in the least at what he looked like; he preferred ‘taking things as they come’ and had never been in the habit of paying much attention to appearances: although his memory sometimes managed this unaided.

  ‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘I can’t bear mysteries. Things in this world should be plain and above-board; as far, at any rate, as we humans can make them. And why a silly foolish inconsequent dream like that should leave any more impression than a child’s picture book on the waking rational mind I cannot conceive – if, that is, one’s mind is ever completely rational. No doubt these psycho-analysts could make hay, and pretty sour hay at that, of the whole thing. Whether or not, and I don’t care, it has haunted me ever since. You see, then I knew the meaning of it; and to know all, they say, is to forgive all. But now it’s gone.

  ‘Besides, somehow or other, this seemed to be not merely and only a dream. For without being conscious of any transition from sleeping to waking, I presently, as I say, found myself lying on my back in Louis’s ornate and luxurious but most comfortable four-poster – staring up at his virgin plaster. The merest trickle of moonlight was edging in between the grey-blue window-curtains, causing the sort of dusky gloom that had seemed to be the illumination of my stony cell in the pyramid; yet it cast a pale narrow shaft of light clean across the ceiling. If she had not been well past the full this couldn’t of course have happened; though I don’t profess to be much of a moon expert. In fact, my dear, I claim to fall just that much short of being the “compleat” lunatic. There was light enough at any rate to show up vaguely the actual pattern of the stain on the whitewash – the stain, I mean, made by the rain that had leaked through the roof, or through the floorboards perhaps of an attic above me, owing to Louis’s loose tiles. To that degree we are both of us lunatics!

  ‘However that may be, there, sure enough, was the general design of the cartouche. And no doubt merely because the dreaming mind or fancy is so densely thronged with symbols which are supposed to be hints or warnings to the waking consciousness, I detected in the patterns precisely the same details as those of the dreamed-of hieroglyphics. Not only that; for some minutes together I accepted the same ridiculous interpretation: “It was Here”. It happened Here. And naturally, I was pestered by exactly the same question – What?

  ‘Well, all old beds – and Louis’s also – unless, which is quite possible, it is a fake, is Elizabethan – all old beds must not only have had scores of nocturnal occupants, but must have witnessed many uneasy, wakeful, miserable and possibly even tragic nights. Peaceful, pleasant, amorous, happy and visionary ones too. One is born, one marries, one dies; and all three usually involve a bed of some kind – from W.S.’s “second-best” to Procrustes’. They say, you know, that what are called ghosts may be merely an outcome, impressing the imagination of the living, of tragic events that have left their indelible mark on the inanimate objects around them. Why not a bed, then? Why not?’

  He had paused again, but not as if in wait for any critical comment or appreciation, since he had at once hastened on with: ‘I don’t want, my dear, naturally enough, to destroy my own little romance. But truth must out. When the very neat parlour-maid came in with my tea and drew back the grey-blue curtains, I had a good long look at Louis’s rain-stain in the full unflattering light of morning. Naturally. And, believe it or not, there was scarcely a vestige of the pattern I had seen in it in the small hours. It was now no more than a lozenge-shaped blur which you could, if you wished, turn either into a catafalque with mourning plumes complete, or into some bower of delight out of the Faerie Queene – whichever most suited your fancy.’

  For some minutes Mrs Millington had been sitting, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on the open window, as if she were positively gloating on the intense stillness of the garden and its celestial canopy – like some moulting bird too far gone to chirp or stir, and peering out of the bars of its familiar cage at the vision of unattainable freedom beyond them, or even at a freedom now become impracticable, tarnished and stale. The slightly sallow cheek no longer owed any artificial green to the reflected sunlight; the dark eyes resembled mo
tionless pools in some mountain valley on a starless night, wherein the reflections of the preceding centuries have left nothing but opacity and eclipse.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said at length, ‘been really able to follow a good deal of that last part, William – about the ceiling and the rain-stains and the moon. After you woke up, I mean. Do you mean that what you saw in the dream was caused by a sort of distortion of the actual pattern in the ceiling? In that case surely you must have seen it – perhaps in the few moments before you fell asleep. And yet you say that, after all, the pattern wasn’t really like that at all. It was merely a blur. Besides, no mere rain-stain, surely, could resemble so closely a child, a tree and a tomb? Can’t it have been mere fancy, William, do you think – such as one so often, and without any such intention, re-creates in one’s memory?’

  ‘I am sorry, my dear, for telling it all so badly. But I do mean that the rain-stain by moonlight resembled that. My explanation, right or wrong, is pretty much what you have suggested – that I must have seen, without definitely observing, the stain on the ceiling before going to sleep; that this caused the dream; and that it was the dream that imposed the design or pattern – at least to some extent – upon it. It was merely a mixture of states of mind, the dreaming and the half-dreaming and the awakening. When, then, as I say, Louis’s elegant parlour-maid tapped at my door with my tea, and —’

  As if the word itself had actually summoned her, Mrs Millington’s own parlour-maid at this moment herself opened the door and came in to take the tea-things away. Mr Millington watched her until the door was shut again.

  ‘What a marvellous crop of hair that girl has,’ he remarked. ‘You don’t often see red hair nowadays: or not, at any rate, that sort of golden bronze tint. Mark my words, you won’t keep her for very long … I wish nonetheless she wouldn’t interrupt. But there, my dear, I mustn’t bore you any longer – not for more than one more minute, anyhow; as it is for that I have been waiting. As I was saying, the moment I awoke, I turned my head to look for my dream-cartouche, and the actual disfiguring rain-stain in the morning light no more resembled it than the face I am now turning towards you resembles what it was like, say, about thirty years ago, when you were a little girl with pigtails and aged ten. In those days I was not such a very bad-looking young man, though you might not think it now. And there’s the rub.’

  The vigilant and constricted expression that had steadily deepened on Mrs Millington’s face during this long and wearisome recital, after lifting a little, had intensified again.

  ‘Oh, William,’ she broke out, ‘if only you wouldn’t keep straying off in what you have to tell me. What “rub”? I don’t know what you mean. I’m dreadfully tired, dreadfully stupid, nervy, worked up. It’s this heaviness in the air. Though now, it seems, the storm is not going to break after all. It’s less dark. I dread thunder – am a coward in any crisis. And yet I wish – I wish almost anything. If only it would clear! Oh, everything! – the air! To breathe again! One’s very soul. How you can have managed to keep all this out of your talk at lunch just passes my comprehension. You merely said the trains had gone wrong. Not a word about any dream. Nothing. And even now you haven’t finished. What “rub”?’

  ‘For one reason, you precious, silly, troubled, patient thing, it was because everything I have been telling you concerns solely you and me. I sat as mum as a Grampus at breakfast that next morning, except to congratulate Louis on making his guests so comfortable – and an unexpected guest at that. I don’t imagine that he would be very patient with dreams. Not at least with other people’s. Not even with his own, perhaps – for very long together. He’s so restless, so self-centred, so precarious. I came to the conclusion, my dear, the moment I was in my cab again, that he and I don’t match. I’m sluggish oil; he’s water and – unstable. Let’s drop him out; and the dream too into the bargain. I believe even, as a matter of fact, that deep in your own heart, you share my prejudice.

  ‘However, the “rub” is this. Somehow that silly and meaningless cartouche took me back to when I was about twenty. It was in part a memory, you see; and it was concerned in part with a tree very much like my dream-tree, but not with anything in the nature of a chest or tomb – except perhaps in its general shape. My actual memory of those far-away days is of a tree; late dusk; autumn; a plain damp backless wooden bench. And two anguished people sitting on it.’

  He rose from his chair, yawned, shuddered, and drawing up another next to his wife’s, sat down beside her and laid both his long bony hands over hers and her sewing.

  ‘I want you,’ he said, ‘to listen very carefully to what I am going to tell you, and then to declare quite frankly if it will make the least difference to us. It cannot but alter your ideas of me, what you think of me, what you believed of me. But it’s all far away, remote, boxed up in the past; it was – well, until yesterday – all but forgotten – put out of mind, I mean. There never yet was any real opportunity of its being forgiven; and it’s not for me – not for myself – to forgive it now.’

  His wife had managed to withdraw her left hand from beneath his own, the other remained a prisoner. She was breathing so rapidly that she could hardly articulate clearly.

  ‘I haven’t the least notion,’ she said, ‘what you are going to tell me. Whatever it is, it could not make any difference now. It is, you say, far away; and you were young; and, and human – like the rest of us, young and old. What are we, when all is said? Like bits of elastic, that can stretch so far, but no farther. Then we snap. Nor could it make any difference to what some day, some day … Oh, William, please let me go now. My head is racking; I can hardly see out of my eyes. All you can mean is that this tree of your dream, of your waking and of the past, and those two woeful young people on the wooden seat – why, both, as such, must have rotted away by this time – all you can mean is that men, women, all of us, just because we are human, cannot for ever be fixed in anything, cannot remain absolutely steadfast and unchanged. The failure, the broken hopes, the futile yet lovely romanticalness are in our very natures; and we have, if we are foolish and impetuous, and give away the heart without counting the cost – we have to pay the price, whatever that may be or mean. You were going to tell me about some old love affair, weren’t you? I can see her – sweeter, simpler, more impulsive, better-natured far, far than I have ever been, could be; and I suppose, circumstances, something you weren’t responsible for, something perhaps you were responsible for – well, came in between. Perhaps you even treated her with atrocious unkindness? Well, what then? What we want, what we desire, changes, fades out, William. We cannot help ourselves – not even when we have attained it. Most of us. But the heart itself doesn’t change; only its wants. And if it’s that, I don’t wish, I don’t want you to tell me any more. I can see by your face – your hands are cold – that I have guessed right.’

  She suddenly fell silent, staring at him in the faintly lightening gloom of the open window. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? Very strange? If that hadn’t happened, if you two had never parted, we ourselves would never have met? We should never even have met.’

  * First published in Encounter, December 1954.

  The Picture*

  Lucia drew back overtly at last from the shelter and shadow of the crimson black-lined curtain. Its folds screened an upper window – a shallow bow in shape. From out of its small panes she had been watching her husband. In this last strange year, the first of her married life, she had learned many things about him. She had learned that his loyalty and tenderness, his unwearying secret consideration for her, were not merely due to the funny little fact that simply could not be denied – that he was years and years older than she was; but also because he was wholly himself and – well, loved her. As she loved him? That question, as she had stood, one hand gently resting on the curtain, her dark eyes fixed, had again crept like some predatory little animal into her thoughts. Could it possibly be as much? … This dreadful question of age. He seemed to be so much less apprehe
nsive of his leaving her than was she of his going. Besides …

  The rounded lids above her unusually dark eyes echoed, as it were, the curve of cheek and chin. Her other hand lay on her breast. The sun shone hot on the flawed eighteenth-century glass of the white-framed window. This room of her husband’s was like a little hothouse in the sunshine of early afternoon; and presently she would draw the black-lined crimson curtains again to keep it cool for his coming back.

  Another thing she had learned was, that, to him, habit of spirit, mind and body resembled the serene sky of a St Martin’s summer. Then why – instead of quietly busying himself with trowel or spud – was he merely standing looking down on a bed crammed with Sweet Williams in full bloom? Palest pink, auricular-eye, scarlet, blood-red, deepest crimson – his favourite flower.

  ‘Second childhood, my dear,’ he had remarked more than once, as they had stood there admiring them together. ‘I might as well be five again, in a holland pinafore, and my mother … Hundreds of years ago.’

  Oh yes, that was all very well, but it could not surely explain his present dejected attitude? Or similar far-away ponderings, meditations, usually ending when challenged with an unintended sigh and a prolonged smile – a smile somehow not the less inscrutable because it was so loving. Why should loving anybody ever leave any human heart sorrowful? Whereas – pent-up, hot, and reviling herself beyond words, realizing her own miserable jealousy – it now often left her not only sorrowful but almost faint with doubt and remorse?

  With one sweep of her arm she drew the curtain across the window, and turned, completely concealed by it, towards the portrait again. She knew by rote every inch of it. She was letter-perfect. Harriet, his first love, his first wife. A second string of course need not play the less sweetly because there was once a first. It is itself to blame if it jar its own music. She had married, realizing perfectly well that in every human soul there is room for two, for three or four, perhaps, and that no beloved image in a heart of any depth and fidelity can ever wholly oust, or be ousted, by another.