Short Stories 1927-1956

by Walter De la Mare

I rose stealthily. A vague desire to flee out into the garden seized upon me.

  The sound was repeated.

  I went very slowly to the door. Again I climbed the chair. (I loved the little boy now.) But I could see nothing. I peeped through the keyhole but something obscured the opening upon the other side. A faint odour – unpleasant – was in the house. With desperation of terror I flung open the door. I fancied I heard the sound of panting. I fancied something brushing my arm; then I found myself staring down the hallway listening to the echo of the click of the latch of the door of the room which overlooks my garden. In this unseemly rhythm and this succession of words I write with intent. Thus my thoughts ran then; thus then I write now. Many years ago when I was a young man I was nearly burnt alive. I felt then an honest fear. This was a dim skulking horror of soul and an inhuman depravity. It is impossible for me to tell of my horrid strivings of brain. I staggered into my room; I sat down in my chair; I took my book upon my knee; I put my spectacles upon my nose; but all the time all my senses were dead save that of hearing. Distinctly I felt my ears move and twitch, with the help of some ancient muscle, I conjecture, long disused by humanity. And as I sat, my brain cried out with fear.

  For ten minutes (I slowly counted each sounding ‘cluck’ of my clock) I sat so. At last my limbs began to quake, solitude was driving me to perilous ravines of thought. I crept with guilty tread into the garden. I climbed the fence which separates the next house from mine. This house, No.17, was inhabited by a caretaker, a rude uncouth fellow who used for his living-room only the kitchen, and who had tied all the bells together so that he might not be disturbed. He was a cad of a man. But for companionship I cried out.

  I went to the garden door keeping my eyes fixedly turned away from the window. I hammered at the garden door of the house. I hammered again. A sullen footstep resounded in the empty place and the door was cautiously opened a few inches. A scared face looked out at me through the chink.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said I, ‘come and sup with me. I have a leg of good meat, my dear fellow, come and sup with me.’

  The door opened wider. Curiosity took the place of apprehension. ‘Say, Master, what is moving in the house?’ said the fellow. ‘Why is my ’ead all damp, and my ’ands a shiverin’. I tell you there’s a thing gone wrong in the place. I sits with my back to the wall and somebody steps quick and quiet on the other side. Why am I sick like so? I ask yer why?’

  The man almost wept.

  ‘You silly fellow! May a sick man not pace his mansion. I will give you a five pound note to come and sit with me,’ said I. ‘Be neighbourly, my good fellow. I fear that a fit will overtake me. I am weak – the heat – epileptical too. Rats crowd in the walls, I often hear their tumult. Come, sup with me.’

  The cad shook his villainous head sagely.

  ‘A five pound note – two,’ said I.

  ‘I was chaffin,’ said he, and returned into the house to fetch a poker.

  We climbed the fence and crept like thieves towards the house. But not an inch beyond my door would the fellow come. I expostulated. He blasphemed. He stubbornly stuck to his purpose.

  ‘I don’t budge till I’ve “glimpsed” through that window,’ said he.

  I argued and entreated; I doubled my bribe; I tapped him upon the shoulder and twitted him of cowardice; I performed a pirouette about him; I entreated him to sit with me.

  ‘I don’t budge till I’ve glimpsed through that window.’

  I fetched a little ladder from the greenhouse which stands to the left of the house, and the caretaker carried it to the window, the ledge of which is about five feet from the ground. He climbed laboriously step by step, stretching his neck so as to see into the black room beyond, while I, simply to be near him, climbed behind him.

  He had got halfway and was breathing loudly when suddenly a long arm, thin as its bone, clad in tawny hair, pallid in the dim starlight, pounced across the window and dragged the curtains together – an arm thin as its bone. The fellow above me groaned, threw up his hands and tumbled head-long off the ladder, bringing me to the ground in his fall.

  For a moment I lay dazed; then, lifting my head from the soil and the sweet lilies I perceived him clambering over the fence in savage hurry. I remember that the dew glistened upon his boots as he flung his heels over the fence.

  Presently I was upon my feet and pelting after him, but he was a younger man, and when I reached the door at the back of his house he had already bolted and barred it. To all my prayers and knockings he paid no attention. Notwithstanding, I feel certain that he sat listening upon the other side, for I discerned a hoarse breathing like the breathing of an asthmatic.

  ‘You have left the poker. I bring you the poker,’ I bellowed, but he made no answer.

  Again I climbed the fence, now determined to leave the house free for the thing to roam and to ravage, nor to return till daylight was come. I crept quietly through the haunted place. As I passed the room, I distinguished a sound – like the sound of a humming top – of incessant gabble. I ran and opened the front door and just then, as I peered out upon the street, a beggar clothed in rags shuffled past the garden gate. I leapt down the steps.

  ‘Here my good man,’ said I speaking with difficulty for my tongue seemed stiff and glutinous.

  He turned with an odd whine and shuffled towards me.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ said I. ‘Have you an appetite – just a stubborn yearning for a delicate snack of prime Welsh lamb?’

  The scraggy wretch nodded and gesticulated with warty hands.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ I screamed. ‘You shall eat a meal, poor man. How dire is civilization in rags – Evil fortune! Socialism! Millionaires! I’ll be bound. Come in, come in.’

  I was weeping with delight. He squinted at me with suspicion and again waved his hands. By these movements and by his articulate cries, I fancied the man was dumb. (He was vexed with a serious impediment in his speech I now conjecture.) He was manifesting mistrust. He snuffled.

  ‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Come in, my man and welcome. I am lonely – a Bohemian. Ancient books are musty company. Come sit and cheer me with an honest appetite. Take a glass of wine with me.’

  I patted the wretch on the back. I gripped his arm. In my tragic acting, moreover, I hummed a little song to prove my indifference. He tottered upon my steps in front of me – his shoes were mended with brown paper and the noise of his footsteps was like the rustle of a lady’s silk dress. I blithely followed him into the house leaving the door wide open so that the clean night air might go through the house, so that the clatter of the railroad which lies behind the doctor’s house might prove the reality of the world. I sat the beggar down in an armchair. I plied him with meat and drink. He luxuriated in the good fare, he guzzled my claret, he gnawed bones and crust like a bony beast, considering me the while, apprehensive of being reft of his meal. He snarled and he gobbled, he puffed, he mouthed and he chawed. He was a bird of prey, a cat, a wild beast, and a man. His belly was the only truth. He had chanced on heaven, and awaited the archangel’s trump of banishment. Yet in the midst of his ravenous feeding, terror was netting him, too. Full of my own fear, in watching his hands shivering, and the pallor overspreading his grimy face, I took delight. Still he ate furiously, flouting his fears.

  All the while I was thinking desperately of the horrid creature which was in my house. The while I sat grinning at my guest, the while I was inciting him to eat, drink, and be merry, the while I analysed each deplorable action of the rude fellow and sickened at his beastliness, the vile consciousness of that thing on its secret errand prowling within scent, never left me – that abortion – A-B-O, abortion; I knew then.

  On a sudden, just as the tramp, having lifted the lamb bone, had set his teeth to gnawing at the gristly knuckle, there came to my ears the sound of breaking glass and then a rustling (no extraordinary sound), a rustling sound of a hand wandering upon the panel of a door. But the beggar had heard what speech cannot make intel
ligible. I felt younger on that day than I have since my childhood. I was drunken with terror.

  My beggar, dropping his tumbler of wine but still clutching the lamb bone, scrambled to his feet and eyed me with pale grey pupils set in circles of white. His dirty bleached face was stained with his meal. Dirt seamed his skin. I took his hand in mine. I caught up the lamp and held it on high. The beggar and I stood in the doorway gazing into the darkness; the lamplight faintly lit the familiar passage. It gleamed on the door of the room whose window overlooks my garden. The handle of the door was silently turning. The door was opening – almost imperceptibly. The beggar’s pulse throbbed furiously; my elbow was pressed against his arm. And a very thin abnormal thing – a fawn shadow – came out of the room and pattered past the beggar and me.

  My jaws fell asunder, nor could I shut them so that I might speak. Tighter I clutched the beggar and we fled out together. Standing upon the topmost of the steps, we peered down the street; afar off with ponderous tread walked a policeman, playing the light of his lantern upon the windows of the houses and the doors. Presently he drew near to a lamp, to where flitted a monstrous shadow. I saw the policeman turn suddenly round about. With fluttering coat-tails he ran furiously down a little lane which leads to many bright shops.

  The beggar and I spent the rest of the night upon the doorstep. Sometimes he made vain splutterings of speech and vexed gesticulations, but, generally we waited speechless and motionless as two stuffed owls.

  At the first faint ray of dawn, which leapt above the doctor’s house opposite, the beggar flung away my hand, hopped blindly down the steps and, pausing not to open the gate, vaulted over it and was immediately gone. I scarcely felt surprise. The green-shaded lamp which stood upon the doorstep slowly burned itself out. The sun rose gladly, the sparrows made the morning noisy as they fluttered and fought in their busy foraging. I think my round eyes vaguely watched them.

  Soon after eight the postman brought me a letter. And this was the letter – ‘God forgive me, friend, and help me to write sanely. A miserable curiosity has proved too strong for me. I went back to my house, now woefully strange to me. I could not sleep. Now pacing with me in my own bedroom, now wrapped in its unholy sleep, the thing as always with me. Each picture, indeed each chair, however severely I strove to discipline my thoughts, carried with it a pregnant suggestion. In the middle of the night I took my way downstairs and opened the door of my study. My books seemed to me disconsolate friends offended. The case stood as we had left it – we, you and I, when we locked the door upon the tragedy. In fear and trembling I went a little farther into the room. Two steps had I taken when I discovered that the lid no longer shut the thing from the stars, that the lid was gaping open. Oh! Pelluther, how will you credit so astounding a statement. I saw (I say it solemnly though I have to labour vigorously to drive back a horde of thoughts) I saw the wretched creature, which you and I had raised from the belly of the earth, lying upon the floor; its meagre limbs were coiled in front of the fire. Had the heat roused him from his long sleep? I know not, I dare not think. He – he, Pelluther – lay upon the hearth-rug sunken in slumber soundlessly breathing. Oh, my friend, I stand eyeing insanity, face to face. My mind is mutinous. There lay the wretched abortion: – it seems to me that this thing is like a pestilent secret sin, which lies hid, festering, weaving snares, befouling the wholesome air, but which, some day, creeps out and goes stalking midst healthy men, a leprous child of the sinner. Ay, and like a sin perhaps of yours and of mine. Pelluther! But, being heavy with such a woesome burden it becomes us alone to bear it. I left the thing there in its sleep. Its history the world shall never know. I write this to warn you of the awful terror of the event which has come upon you and me. When you come,1 we will make our plans to destroy utterly this horrid memory. And if this be not our lot we must exist but to hide our discovery from the eyes of the sane. If any suffer, it is you and I who must suffer. If murder can be just, the killing of this creature – neither man nor beast, this vile symbol – must be accounted to us a virtue. Fate has chosen her tools. Come, my old friend! I have sent away my servants and locked my door; and my prayer is that this thing may sleep until darkness comes down to cloak our horrid task from the eyes of the world. Science is slunk away shamefaced; religion is a withered flower. Oh, my friend, what shall I say! How shall I regain myself?’

  From the slender record of this letter I leave you to deduce whatever conclusions you may. I may suppose that at some time of the second day (perhaps, while I was rambling through the green places of Kew!) Dugdale had again visited the thing and had found it awake, alert, vigilant in his room. No man spied upon my friend in those hours. (Sometimes in the quietude, I fancy I hear an odd footfall upon my threshold!)

  In the brilliant sunshine I drove in a four-wheeled cab to Dugdale’s house, for my limbs were weak and would hardly bear my body. I limped up the garden path and the familiar steps with the help of two sticks. The door was ajar – I entered. I found Dugdale in his study. He was sitting in the chest with a Bible resting on one of the sides.

  He looked at me. ‘“For we are but of yesterday and know nothing because our days upon earth are a shadow.” What is life, Pelluther? A vain longing for death. What is beauty? A question of degree. And sin is in the air – child of disease and death and springing-up and hatred of life. Fawn hair has beauty and as for bones; surely less for the worms. Worms! through lead? Pelluther, my dear old Pell. Through lead?’

  He gazed at me like a child gazing at a bright light.

  ‘Come!’ said I, ‘the air is bland and the sun is fierce and warm. Come!’ I could say no more.

  ‘But the sunlight has no meaning to me now,’ said he. ‘That breeder of corruption, tall here and a monstrous being, walks under my skull strangling all the other beings, puny and sapless. I have one idea, conception, vivid faintness, a fierce red horrid idea – and a phenomenon, too. You see, it is when a deep abstract belief rots into loathing, when hope is eaten away by horrors of sleep and a mad longing for sleep – mad! Yet fawn hair is not without beauty; provided, Pelluther, provided – through lead?’…

  A vain idle report has been set about by the malicious. Oh, was there not reason and logical sequence in his conversation with me? I give it for demonstration’s sake. I swear that he is not mad – a little eccentric (surely all clever men are eccentric), a little aged. I swear solemnly that my dear friend Dugdale was not mad. He was a just man. He wronged no one. He was a benevolent kindly gentleman and fine in intellect. Say you that he was eccentric – not mad. Tears ran down my cheeks as I looked at him.

  * Eight Tales, ed. Edward Wagenknecht, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1971, where Wagenknecht claims that it was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine. However, no trace of it there has been found. A story that was being offered for serialization in 1896, according to Theresa Whistler, it seems to have been included by Wagenknecht with de la Mare’s approval, like the rest of the stories in Eight Tales.

  1 I perceive that Dugdale omitted to post this letter in time to reach me on the second evening. I bitterly deplore the omission.

  UNPUBLISHED STORIES

  The Orgy: An Idyll*

  Part II

  In less than three minutes, having bolted from Sir Leopold’s warren by the minor exit, Philip found himself seated in a minute and charming tea-shop. Though it was neither its size nor its charm but its propinquity which had invited him in, it was clearly a tea-shop intended for the daintier appetites. There were flowers. There were nymphs in the chicest of caps and aprons, armed with what were almost certainly solid silver salvers. There were lustres and silk shades, and napery almost as delicate as that which Philip had ordered for his housekeeper’s room at No.444. And there was the gentlest of artificial light. It hung in the air like a tenuous amethystine mist against the cobalt gloom of the street outside.

  And since Philip was at this moment more in need of a mother than he had been since he was weaned, it could only have been his good angel who had g
uided his flying steps into this little hostelry. Only his good angel who could have inspired the pretty waitress, after vainly attempting to catch the meaning of the order he choked out, to bring him a cup of chocolate and a meringue. Philip had thereupon sunk into the densest fog of incredulity of which the human mind is capable.

  It had been a lark. Oh, yes, it had been a preternatural, unprecedented, top-hole lark. But then, even larks must return at last to terra firma. So had Philip’s. But what occupied his inward eye at the moment was not so much the visionary shape of Ruin, or the Ghoul of Beingfoundout, or even his Uncle Pim, but the secretary he had but just left behind him. He had, it is true, taken this reptile by the horns. On the other hand he had been compelled to leave go. It would be very dreadful indeed to bow the knee to that Baal. O for the wings of a dove, his spirit sighed. But Philip refused to listen. For only the wings of an eagle (as he falsely supposed), could be of the slightest assistance. No, he refused to fly. Ten shillings and a penny is a poor sum with which to face the voyage to South America. He would, as had so many felons in the Press before him, face the music.

  The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,

  For he heard the loud bassoon.

  He would himself attend next day punctually at four o’clock in Grosvenor Square. It would be inconsiderate to the furniture men to come earlier, but only by a very few minutes would he be just too late to enjoy the vista of vans. And then, the handcuffs, the shackles, the manacles, the dungeon, perdition.

  Confronted with this awful moment he raised his head, and gazing through the delicately wreathing steam of his chocolate met the eyes of a young lady, who, seated at a little round table not four yards off, had for the last five minutes been steadily watching him. Not with her whole clear lovely eye, it is true, but out of a tiny fraction of it, and that an infinitesimal distance from its precise focussing point. In all Nature’s marvellous array of living creatures, wild swan to bird of paradise, giraffe to gazelle, there is nothing so secret, responsive and beautiful as the human eye. There is nothing that can so swiftly plead with and soothe a troubled spirit, even though it be the eye of a young stranger whom one has never in one’s whole life seen before.