Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

  An all but sleepless night of agonized turmoil – hope, fear, ghastly doubt and foreboding, had not helped to prepare her for the postman’s knock first thing in the morning. Shivering, hopeless, she had been standing at the door awaiting it, had even intercepted the fall of the letter on to the mat. Its mere opening words had seemed to change what before had seemed a dream into a nightmare that now until life went too could have no end.

  The decanters, the glasses, Mrs Hatton’s ‘best’, glittered on the tray before her as if with a million tiny hard bright eyes. Minute reflections, hundreds of them – her blue print dress and white apron – mimicked her every movement in their facetings. How long, she was thinking now, would the young man who she knew was the secret incitement of Mrs Hatton’s party, how long would he be sitting in the dining-room? Would Miss Constance be back in time to see him? Whether or not, her own knell would sound in a moment or two, and she must then, her frantic tortured self somehow, somewhere kept in hiding, face her mistress again.

  The glasses had wildly jangled at the dreaded buzzing of the bell. Well, she could at least avoid a second confrontation. Hands trembling, her body all but refusing to obey her, she lifted the tray, and balancing herself with one foot, pushed open the kitchen door. That of the dining-room – an oasis of lace, gilt, silver and mauve – was ajar, and, as she paused there, one curt scoffing sentence reached her ear: ‘Oh no! I’m certain of that – she’ll never marry him.’

  The ‘she’, she knew well, was not meant for herself – she knew that; and yet every sinew, every artery in her body seemed to have tautened and relaxed again. Yet in spite of this tension, in the next instant she had detected the young man’s dully astonished glance from under his sleek hair and black eyebrows just as he himself had detected the abrupt transition of the sly beguiling smile in the face of his future mother-in-law into a cold acid searching scrutiny of the tragic figure in the doorway.

  Indeed, as if in preparation for the moment, Mrs Hatton seemed to have erected her bosom like that of a pouter pigeon. She sat rigidly in her ‘easy’ chair, one claw-like hand clasping the arm, her narrow censorious reptilian head turned towards the door.

  ‘I rang for the sherry, Jessie. Don’t fuss with the glasses now. Put the tray there on the sideboard.’

  The girl shot her a glance as if from the crater of a volcano utterly guileless of heat or light. With a sob she had failed to stifle, she had rested the tray a moment on the corner of the sideboard, at the same time thrusting out a quaking hand to push back the silver vase of Madonna lilies already wilting after their late night. It had toppled, she had saved it, but the tray had already slipped on the polished edge, the young man had cried, ‘Oh, I say!’ and a faint scream had issued from his hostess’s lips even before in a ringing glissade its contents had crashed and splintered into countless fragments on the floor at her feet.

  In the minute pause, as of an eternity of silence, that followed, mistress and maid had indeed confronted one another. The very inmost self which had leapt at this summons to the windows of their eyes seemed to be locked like Jacob and the angel in an appalling embrace.

  Almost demurely – her face, which had withered so abruptly in her widowhood after her brief experience of married life – grey as a sepulchre with rage and contempt, Mrs Hatton had at last lowered her fair-fringed pale lids.

  ‘Quite a little catastrophe,’ her false teeth grinned. ‘I rather fancied that that would happen. Don’t gawk now. Bring a dust-pan and a broom. But the sherry first, and at once. The tray’ – she had once more sluggishly eyed her victim – ‘the tray slipped, I see. As I was saying, Hubert,’ she turned to her visitor, ‘I am sure there is not the least chance of Constance’s …’

  Here at last was the kitchen again, its open window brilliant with the summer sun and the green of the garden – and standing beside it, her pretty painted face radiant with joy and vanity, who but Constance, come in the back way!

  ‘He’s said it, Jessie,’ she cried ecstatically. ‘Not ten minutes ago! Didn’t I tell you so! But would you believe it? Where is she now? Is he in there? My heavens! What will she say? Look at that!’

  Slipping off the pretty ring that had only a few minutes before been slipped on to it, she poised it between tip of finger and thumb in the light of the window. ‘Emeralds! Look! – green for jealousy! But ssh! Quick! Who’s that? She’s coming!’

  Jessie too had been listening – like an animal entrapped and awaiting the snarer. She too had caught the tapping high-heeled footfall. In but a few hours she seemed to have become emaciated, all but lifeless. Heart and soul, quiet and faithful, so recently her own to surrender seemed to have died within her. But now it was only a little time, alas, she needed – time to prepare for the future and all her letter meant. It was her last remaining hope. Instinctively she had clutched at the cheap scrap of note-paper, and had thrust it into the tin caddy to join the mates it had for ever betrayed. And all but at the same instant a tiny tinkle had rung out as the ring, colliding with the edge of the canister, followed it in. But the crannied kitchen door had been left a few inches ajar. It was now gently pushed open.

  ‘Ah, Constance, you are there, then,’ a quiet insinuating voice remarked; ‘Hubert is waiting in the dining-room. And Jessie, I am still waiting for the sherry. But meanwhile’ – her cold greenish eye had surveyed each conspirator in turn – ‘would you be so kind as to pass me that little tea-caddy?’

  * According to a note on a typescript version of this story, it was serialized in the Star. It has not been possible either to confirm or disprove this, but since there is no special reason to doubt it, the story has been included. It may have been written sometime in the 1930s.

  A Sort of Interview*

  Still the victim of a slight vertigo, I found myself – well – where I was. But none too much at ease. It was a prodigiously lofty room for its area. Its sepulchre-white walls went up and up around me, and in so odd a perspective that even in the light of the long windows it was difficult to detect in any detail the bulbous amorini, the gilded gewgaws and slabs of looking-glass in the ceiling and cornice. An enormous candle-less chandelier dangled from on high above a vase of dried and dyed immortelles; and the famous personage whom I now realized I was about to have the privilege of interviewing was seated – one lean shank negligently crossed over the other – in a chromium-plated chair before a fire, ingeniously constructed to mimic flaming coals. A metal tab proclaimed it a Like-Lite. Flaming! Its candescent tongues literally capered above the burnished copper; with little effect, however, either in the way of light or heat in this louring apartment.

  I was a novice, and nervous. And as if, it seemed, with the intention of making our talk pleasant and homely, the Great One had attired himself in a voluminous red dressing-gown edged with ermine and resembling that of Santa Claus on a Victorian Christmas card. His countenance exhibited an ambiguous but seemingly disarming smile. A skull cap of black velvet perched high in two shapeless bulbs above his brows was in becoming contrast with his parchment skin. An immense cameo ring – the nude figure, it appeared, of an antique goddess – adorned the forefinger of the knuckled hand resting on the glass table, on which stood a gourd-shaped bottle of exquisite crystal, three parts full of a pale cloudy liquid. It suggested a mixture of absinthe and green Chartreuse. There was a faint odour of sulphur on the air – doubtless the electric fire – and, as I fancied, of almonds.

  ‘We will not discuss that yet,’ he had suavely remarked with a jocular nod in the direction of the bottle as he invited me to be seated. ‘You have come, I gather,’ he said, glancing at my card, ‘to share my views on children’s books. Needless to say, I am profoundly interested in children’s books. Who is not that has at heart the – well, the welfare of the young? Many of them are of excellent service. Others, not so. We shall come to that. But the moot point – the moot point,’ he seemed to palate the phrase, ‘is whether the child should read what it desires to read, what its virgin inclinations i
ncite it to read, or what its betters, you take me, insist on its reading. Which is the more profitable, I wonder? Take, er—’ he glanced again at my card, ‘take your own case, Mr Donky. What literature in your infancy do you perhaps best remember? What, briefly, has brought you to – this?’ The winning little leer with which he accompanied the remark all but deprived it of irony.

  ‘When I was very young,’ I said, glancing at my note-book, pencil between fingers, ‘a family friend gave me a large linen-leafed copy of Gulliver’s Travels.’

  ‘Indeed – a pleasing little discourse by a dignitary of the Church on the sanity, sagacity, and sanctity of man. It should have helped.’

  ‘Yes, but it was the tiny Lilliputians doubled up with sneezing in the gigantic gold snuff-box …’

  ‘Any others?’ he interrupted. ‘Strict veracity is so important in these matters. Penny dreadfuls, twopenny bloods, perhaps? The Newgate Calendar?’

  I smiled a little sheepishly. ‘Well, yes. Wasn’t its poster with the pictures printed then on pink? Even novelettes: elongated gentlemen in swallowtails, lolling against marble chimneypieces or terraced urns in the moonlight, talking to what seemed to me to be the most angelic ladies. In full evening dress, you know.’

  ‘And the Sabbath?’ He stood with his back to the window, the habitual posture, I believe, of the eminent when interviewed. But I intercepted nonetheless the glitter of his eye.

  ‘Well, on Sundays,’ I said, ‘I was restricted to a weekly magazine of an elevating character, The Day of Rest. But I have referred to all this before, and even in print.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said he, ‘I am all for elevation. And no doubt I was with you in spirit. And which of its pieties are now uppermost in memory?’

  ‘Oddly enough,’ I replied, with some little animation, ‘the only contribution that I can recall is a story that was entitled “God and the Man”. It was a story about two bitter enemies, a saturnine hunchback and an athlete named Christian. They had been wrecked, with the woman they passionately loved, on an iceberg. The hunchback, I remember, had an axe – but whether or not he eventually despatched his successful rival – that eludes me. Women are like that. It was bitterly cold.’ I endeavoured to stifle a shiver.

  ‘They are,’ said he, ‘and I myself have little doubt that your friend the hunchback succeeded. We must look up the sequel. A scene of some little activity, I should surmise. You have mentioned the “Man”. Where did the – er – the other come in?’

  ‘God?’

  ‘H’m.’

  ‘It’s a strange thing,’ I replied candidly, but that too I cannot recollect.’

  ‘We can only trust then that he was a jealous one. And later?’

  ‘Well, I recall a small fat dumpy little book, minute type – diamond, I fancy, possibly pearl – very thick through, pink cloth cover, gilt. At school. It – it distressed me – shocked me. One is so silly in one’s youth. I was afraid, I mean – well, the masters. And after attempting again and again to burn it – it merely charred – I dumped it at last into, in fact, the Thames.’

  ‘Indeed. How wasteful, eh? – with the dead dogs and the suicides. Yet shame in the young may at times be of sovereign value. And Eric perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I see even now the dark stain on the carpet made by my tears when my revered headmaster was reading it to us – little by little. The book I mentioned was The Mysteries of Paris. It was written by a Frenchman, you know – Marie Joseph Sue. He called himself Eugène.’

  ‘Well, between you and me, my dear young sir, though it mustn’t be mentioned in literary circles, I myself volunteered a helping finger to Eugène. He was a Man of the World. Now tell me, which of these two episodes do you remember with the least shame? Endeavouring to burn the little book, or the stain on the carpet? Both no doubt helped. Pathos softens not merely the hearts of the young?’

  ‘Well,’ thought I to myself, ‘surely it is for me to be asking questions.’ However, he had not waited for an answer.

  ‘You appear to have been a child of assorted tastes; and now, having mounted the ladder, you come to interview me. And there was Grimm, perhaps? The unfortunate queen in the barrel with the spikes, rolled down into the sea – at Gadara, no doubt. I myself,’ he announced, as I fancied, a little brazenly, ‘kept pigs there once. And The Arabian Nights? Disastrously expurgated? Garlic and severed thumbs and so on? And what, say, of the wholesome Walter Scott?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Good,’ he said; ‘an infant of some discernment. But let us, as they say in a country fairly familiar to me in parts, proceed to brass tacks. Let us for a while dismiss the upper shelf. Now what I myself – I myself, you understand – admire most, value most highly in humans, is an active, searching, indomitable intellect, intent solely on Facts. For the very good reason that Truth is nothing more substantial and no less stultifying than Beauty. Human nature, my dear young friend, is a positive hotbed, a morass of very peculiar phenomena. They may be dredged for, brought to the surface. And that can be achieved solely by a passion for Facts. Free me the ooze in a child’s mind and I will ensure its future. Trailing, in the poet’s words, “trailing shrouds of” – of what was it? – “do they come”; though I myself am more intent on where they will go to. There is much to be said for the Ape – a very persistent fellow. A little more than kin if less than kind. As says old Adam in the play – you know your Shakespeare, Mr Donky? – “Yonder comes my master …” And again, “For in my youth I ever did apply Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood.” As I was saying, I dote on children; but not, emphatically not, on the typical English species. “Their graces,” to quote again from our Old Adam, “their graces serve them but as enemies.” They are in general too docile, too lethargic, cosseted. The nursery, the mother – that suffocating she-bear – can be disastrously enervating. School may help, of course – in fact it frequently does. The university also. But in one respect, if that alone, I am with Plato. I am all for the baby-farm. Tell them that. The alien spinster, provided of course she is gifted with a sharp long nose, a flat foot, and a complex or two, is by instinct an ideal preceptress. Nothing childish, or, worse, “childlike”, there. Perhaps you yourself have dear little nieces and nephews? Maybe even a lisping poppet of your own? So? I myself have always been a bachelor,’ he inclined a sidelong head. ‘I agree that your fellow-countrymen, by methods best known to themselves (and a few to me), have succeeded in percolating into most of the fattest regions of the globe. Unfortunately however there is a sort of sediment deeming itself a leaven, which quite candidly, for want of a better word, I abhor. Not, mind you, necessarily all the pastors and masters. Quite a substantial little minority of them have their uses. But in general it is the Englishman’s fluffy-mindedness, his distaste for ideas, his ineptitude in realizing what best serves my purpose, and therefore his own, his meringue-like idealism – it is all this I find distressing. Imagine it, my dear young friend; your fellow-countrymen are now – with the aid, I admit, of machine-fed turkeys and that dismal soporific of the conscience, plum-pudding – about to “keep up” Christmas. They are squalling “peace on earth” – but in how different a key from that of my friends in Prussia! Tell me, Mr Donky, do you know the Italian for goodwill?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No? Then you are unfamiliar with a poet who himself visited my own dear fatherland some six centuries ago?’

  I smiled.

  ‘That’s better. But to return to Christmas, a gluttonous festival intended to celebrate a distressing episode in an abject little eastern province which proved nothing but a pest even to the Romans, now nearly two thousand years ago! Christmas, I say, since at Christmas come the books for children. Avalanches of them, largely consisting of what resembles blotting paper. Believe me, I do not intend to crab. Some of them, though these are tepid in intention, I cordially admire. Your English publishers – not all of them, I regret to say, but some – mean well. A few, the more obscure, mean very well.
And, as I have so often repeated – deaf adders, alas! – in books as in life there is nothing bad but thinking makes it so. Apart from cast-iron facts, I know nothing better in literature for the nursery than the goody-goody, the silly, the pretentious and the pseudo-juvenile that is aimed at ripened uncle and miscellaneous aunt, and catches the infantile on the rebound. What in your country is sadly needed is discipline, drastic restrictive discipline, with plenty of rod, and that in pickle. Make the children think my way. That at present, it appears, we shall not get. Why, these fatuous juveniles merely play at soldiers. The ammunition of their pop-guns, think of it, is made of cork! It must much amuse Chicago. What then, I announce, is this: that until we can arm with three-inch steel these childish craniums to keep the ideas we wish to instil into them secure, better far (to come back to our little friend Eric) soften their contents. And since we cannot petrify their little hearts in the manner the more advanced races of mankind now exemplify, why not rot them? Why not, I say?’

  I endeavoured in vain to hold the steel blue eye. ‘Bad books’, I inscribed in my note-book. ‘Ay,’ said he, squinting over my shoulder, ‘and add badly written. It is an astonishing fact that even books which any reputable bishop would stigmatize as improper may, simply because their grammar is excellent and their style sound, fail entirely of any active effect. There are parochial magazines, my dear sir, leagues away from the improper, of course, which in my view – I say in my view – are nearer my purpose. And leagues reminds me of versts. Are you aware that the Soviet Union recently issued an edict that the fairy tale was to be circulated in vast quantities in the Russian schools? Not a decade ago, you may remember, they did precisely the opposite. Tell me for why?’