Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  £80,000 @ £4 per centum per annum

  = £80,000 × 4 ÷ 100 = £3,200.

  It was the first really enjoyable sum she had ever done. And yet Miss Gimp was a little put about when Jean Elspeth showed it to her father. Still, Mr MacKnackery, senior, had been a really rich man, and regretted that the gentleman who bought his factory could never afterwards make such fine burlap as himself, nor even such durable twine.

  He lived to be eighty, and then he died, leaving his money to his son, Robert Duncan Donald David, Jean Elspeth’s father. And when he died, his dear wife Euphemia Tabitha being dead too, he left all that was over of the £80,000 (for, alas and alas! he had lost a good part of it) to his three daughters: Euphemia, Tabitha, and Jean Elspeth.

  When Jean Elspeth was old enough to breakfast with the family in the big dining-room with the four immense windows, she used to sit opposite the portraits of her grandfather, her father, and her mother. They hung in heavy handsome gilt frames on the wall opposite the windows. And while in her high chair she gobbled up her porridge – and gobbled it up quickly, not so much because she liked it as because she hated being put in the corner for not eating it – she would sit and look at them.

  Her grandfather’s was by far the largest of the three portraits, and it hung in the very middle of the lofty wall, under the moulded ceiling. He was a stout and imposing man, with bushy whiskers and cold bright blue eyes. The thumb and first finger of his right hand held a fine thick Albert watch-chain, which the painter had painted so skilfully that you could see it was eighteen-carat gold at a single glance. So he hung: for ever boldly staring down on his own great dining-room and all that was in it – yet not appearing to enjoy it very much.

  What was more, her grandfather always looked exactly as if he were on the point of taking out his watch to see the time; and Jean Elspeth had the odd notion that, if he ever did succeed in so doing, its hands would undoubtedly point to a quarter to twelve. But she could no more have told you why, than she could tell you why she used to count each spoonful of her porridge, or why she felt happier when the last spoonful was an odd number.

  The portrait of her father was that of a man much less stout and imposing than her grandfather. He was dark, and smiling, and he had no whiskers. And Jean Elspeth had loved him dearly. Every morning when she had finished her breakfast (and if nobody was looking) she would give a tiny little secret wave of the spoon towards him, as if he might be pleased at seeing her empty plate.

  On the other side of her grandfather’s portrait hung a picture of her mother. And the odd thing about this picture was that, if you looked long enough, you could not help seeing – as if it were almost the ghost of Jean Elspeth – her very own small face, peeping out of the paint at you, just like a tiny little green marmoset out of a cage all to itself in the Zoo. Jean Elspeth had discovered this when she was only seven; but Euphemia and Tabitha had never noticed it at all.

  They knew they were far less like their mother (who had been a Miss Reeks MacGillicuddy of Kelso) than their grandfather. Still they were exceedingly proud of that. As for Jean Elspeth, they didn’t think she was like any of the family at all. Indeed, Euphemia had more than once remarked that Jean Elspeth had ‘nae deegnity’, and Tabitha that ‘she micht jist as weel ha’ been a changeling’. Even now, when they were elderly ladies, they always treated her as if she were still not very far from being a child, though, after all, Jean Elspeth was only five years younger than Tabitha.

  But then, how different she was in looks! For while Tabitha had a long pale face a little like a unicorn’s, with mouse-coloured hair and green-grey eyes, Jean Elspeth was dark and small, with red in her cheek and a tip to her nose. And while Tabitha’s face changed very little, Jean Elspeth’s was like a dark little glancing pool on an April morning. Sometimes it looked almost centuries older than either of her sisters’, and then, again, sometimes it looked simply no age at all.

  It depended on what she was doing – whether she was sitting at seven o’clock dinner on Great Occasions, when the Bults, and the McGaskins, and Dr Menzies were guests, or merely basking idly in the sunshine at her bedroom window. Jean Elspeth would sometimes, too, go wandering off by herself over the hills a mile or two away from the house. And then she looked not a minute older than looks a harebell, or a whinchat, perched with his white eyebrow on a fuzz-bush near a lichenous half-hidden rock among the heather.

  However sad, too, she looked, she never looked grim. And even though (at dinner parties) she parted her hair straight down the middle, and smoothed the sides over as sleek as satin, she simply could not look what is called ‘superior’. Besides, she had lips that were the colour of cherries, and curious quick hands that she was sometimes compelled to clasp together lest they should talk even more rapidly than her tongue.

  Now in Stoneyhouse nobody – except perhaps the tweeny-maid and the scullery-maid, Sally and Nancy McGullie, who were cousins – ever talked much. It was difficult even to tell exactly how wise and sagacious and full of useful knowledge Euphemia and Tabitha were, simply because except at meals they so seldom opened their mouths. And never to sing.

  This, perhaps, was because it is impossible to keep order if everybody’s tongue keeps wagging. It wastes time, too; for only very few people can work hard and talk hard both at the same moment. And in Stoneyhouse everything was in apple-pie order (except the beds), and nobody ever wasted any time (except kissing-time).

  And yet, although time was never wasted, nobody seemed to be very much the better off for any that was actually ‘saved’. Nobody had ever managed to pack some of it up in neat brown-paper parcels, or to put it in a bank as Mr MacKnackery, senior, had put his money, or to pour it into jars like home-made jam. It just went. And in Stoneyhouse (until, at least, Euphemia one morning received a certain letter) it went very very slowly. The big hands of its clocks seemed to be envious of the little ones. They crept like shadows. And between their ‘tick’ and their ‘tock’ at times yawned a huge hole, as dark as a cellar. So, at least, Jean Elspeth fancied.

  One glance at Stoneyhouse, even from the outside, would tell you how orderly it was. The four high white walls, with their large square slate roof fixed firmly on top of them, stood stiff as bombardiers on extremely solid foundations, and they on even solider rock. No tree dared cast a shadow upon them, no creeper crept. The glossy windows, with their straight lines of curtains behind them, just stared down on you as if they said, ‘Find the faintest speck or smear or flaw in us if you can!’ And you hadn’t the courage even to try.

  It was just so inside. Everything was frozen in its place. Not only the great solid pieces of furniture which Mr MacKnackery had purchased with his burlap money – wardrobes, coffers, presses, four-posters, highboys, sideboards, tables, sofas, and oak chairs – but even all the little things, bead-mats, footstools, candle-snuffers, boot-trees, ornaments, knick-knacks, Euphemia’s silks and Tabitha’s water-colours. There was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. Yes, and it was kept there.

  Except in Jean Elspeth’s room. She had never never learned to be tidy, not even in her sums. She was constantly taking things out, and either forgetting to put them away again or putting them away again in their wrong places. And do you suppose she blamed herself for this? Not at all. When she lost anything and had been looking for it for hours and hours – a book, or a brooch, or a ribbon, or a shoe – she would say to herself, laughing all over, ‘Well now, there! That Lucy must have hidden it!’ And presently there it would be, right in the middle of her dressing-table or under a chair, as if a moment before it had been put back there; just for fun.

  And who was this ‘Lucy’? There couldn’t be a more difficult question; and Jean Elspeth had never attempted to answer it. It was one of those questions she never even asked herself. At least, not out loud. This, perhaps, was because she hated the thought of hurting anybody’s feelings. As if Lucy … but never mind!

  It was Lucy, at any rate, who so unfortunately came into
that dreadful talk over the porridge on the morning when the fatal letter came to Euphemia. It arrived just like any other letter. The butler, with his mouth as closely shut as usual, had laid it beside Euphemia’s plate. Judging from its large white envelope, nobody could possibly have thought it was as deadly as a poison and sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Euphemia opened it, too, just as usual – with her long, lean forefinger, and her eyebrows lifted a little under her grey front of hair. Then she read it – and turned to ice.

  It was from her lawyer, or rather from her Four Lawyers, for they all shared the same office, and at the foot of the letter one of them had signed all their four names. It was a pitch-black letter – a thunderbolt. It said at the beginning that the Miss MacKnackeries must expect in future to be a little less well off than they had been in the past, and it said at the end that they were ruined.

  You see, Euphemia’s grandfather had lent what remained of his £80,000 (after building his great mansion) to the British Government, for the use of the British nation. The British Government of that day put the money into what were called the Consolidated Funds. And to show how much obliged they were to Mr MacKnackery for the loan of it, they used every year to pay him interest on it – so many shillings for every hundred pounds. Not so much as £4 per annum, as Jean Elspeth had put down in her sum, but as much as they could afford – and that was at least 1,000,000 bawbees. There couldn’t have been a safer money-box; nor could Mr MacKnackery’s income have ‘come in’ more reguarly if it had come in by clockwork. So far the British Government resembled Stoneyhouse itself.

  But the Miss MacKnackeries’s father was not only a less imposing man than their grandfather, he had been much less careful of his money. He enjoyed helping the nation to use the Funds. He delighted in buying things and giving presents, and the more he bought the more he wanted to buy. So he had gradually asked for his money back from the British Government, spending most of it and lending the rest to persons making railways and gasworks in foreign parts, and digging up gold and diamonds, and making scent out of tar, and paint which they said would never wear off or change colour, and everything like that.

  These persons paid him for helping them like this a good deal more than the Consolidated Funds could pay him. But then gasworks are not always so safe as the British nation. It is what is called a speculation to lend gentlemen money to help them to dig up diamonds or to make waterworks in Armenia, which means that you cannot be perfectly sure of getting it back again. Often and often, indeed, the Miss MacKnackeries’s father had not got his money back again.

  And now – these long years after his death – the worst had befallen. The Four Lawyers had been suddenly compelled to tell the Miss MacKnackeries that nearly every bit left of their grandfather’s savings was gone; that their solid gold had vanished like the glinting mists of a June morning. They had for some time been accustomed to growing less and less rich; but that’s a very different thing from becoming alarmingly poor. It is the difference between a mouse with a fat nugget of cheese and a mouse with a breadcrumb.

  Euphemia, before opening the letter, had put on her pince-nez. As she read, the very life seemed to ebb out of her poor old face, leaving it cold and grey. She finished it to the last word, then with a trembling hand took the glasses off her nose and passed the letter to Tabitha. Tabitha could still read without spectacles. Her light eyes angled rapidly to and fro across the letter, then she, too, put it down, her face not pale, but red and a little swollen. ‘It is the end, Euphemia,’ she said.

  Jean Elspeth was sitting that morning with her back to the portraits, and at the moment was gently munching a slice of dry toast and Scotch marmalade (made by the Miss MacKnackeries’s cook, Mrs O’Phrump). She had been watching a pied wagtail flitting after flies across the smooth shorn lawn on the white stone terrace. Then her gaze had wandered off to the blue outline of the lovely distant hills, the Grumpy Ones, and her mind had slid into a kind of day-dream.

  Into the very middle of this day-dream had broken the sound of Tabitha’s words, ‘It is the end, Euphemia’; and it was as if a trumpet had sounded.

  She looked round in dismay, and saw her sisters, Euphemia and Tabitha, sitting there in their chairs at the table, as stiff and cold as statues of stone. Not only this, which was not so very unusual, but they both of them looked extremely unwell. Then she noticed the letter. And she knew at once that this must be the serpent that had suddenly bitten her sisters’ minds. The blood rushed up into her cheeks, and she said – feeling more intensely sorry for them both than she could possibly express – ‘Is there anything wrong, Euphemia?’

  And Euphemia, in a voice Jean Elspeth would certainly not have recognized if she had heard it from outside the door, replied, ‘You may well ask it.’ And then in a rush Jean Elspeth remembered her strange dream of the night before and at once went blundering on: ‘Well, you know, Euphemia, I had a dream last night, all dark and awful, and, in it, there was Lucy looking out of a crooked stone window over some water. And she said to me——’

  But Tabitha interrupted her: ‘I think, Elspeth, neither myself nor Euphemia at this moment wishes to hear what Lucy, as you call her, said in your dream. We have received exceedingly bad news this morning, that very closely concerns not only Tabitha and me, but even yourself also. And this is no time for frivolity.’ And it sounded even more tragic in her Scots tongue.

  Jean Elspeth had not meant to be frivolous. She had hoped merely, and if but for a moment, to turn her sisters’ minds away from this dreadful news that had come with the postman, and to explain what her dream had seemed to promise. But no. It was just her way. Whenever she said anything to anyone – anything that came from the very bottom of her heart – she always made a muddle of it. It sounded as small and meaningless as the echo of a sparrow’s cheeping against a bare stone wall. They would look at her out of their green-grey eyes, down their long pale noses, with an expression either grim or superior, or both. Of course, too, at such a moment, any mention of Lucy was a dreadfully silly mistake. Even at the best of times they despised Jean Elspeth for her ‘childishness’. What must they think of her now!

  For there never was and there never could be any real Lucy. It was only a name. And yet Jean Elspeth still longed to find some word of hope or comfort that would bring back a little colour into poor Euphemia’s cheeks, and make her look a little less like an image in marble. But no word came. She had even failed to hear what her sisters were saying. At last she could bear herself no longer.

  ‘I am sure, Euphemia, that you would like to talk the letter over with Tabitha in quiet, and that you will tell me if I can be of any help. I think I will go out into the garden.’

  Euphemia bowed her head. And though, by trying to move with as little noise as possible, Jean Elspeth made her heavy chair give a loud screech on the polished floor, she managed to escape at last.

  It was a cold, clear, spring morning, and the trees in the distance were now tipped with their first green buds. The gardeners were already mapping out their rows of plants in the ‘arbaceous borders’, in preparation for the summer. There never was a garden ‘kept’ so well. The angles of the flower-beds on the lawn – diamonds and lozenges, octagons, squares, and oblongs – were as sharp as if they had been cut out of cardboard with a pair of scissors. Not a blade of grass was out of place.

  If even one little round pebble pushed up a shoulder in the gravel path, up came a vast cast-iron roller and ground him back into his place. As for a weed, let but one poke its little green bonnet above the black mould, it would soon see what happened.

  The wide light from the sky streamed down upon the house, and every single window in the high white wall of it seemed to be scornfully watching Jean Elspeth as she made her way down to a little straight green seat under the terrace. Here, at least, she would be out of their sight.

  She sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and looked straight in front of her. She always so sat when she was in trouble. In vain she tried to compose an
d fix her mind and to think. It was impossible. For she had not been there more than a moment or two before her heart knew that Lucy was haunting somewhere close beside her. So close and so much on purpose, it seemed, that it was almost as if she wanted to whisper something in her ear …

  Now it has been said that Lucy was only a name. Yet, after all, she was a little more than that. Years and years ago, when Jean Elspeth was only seven, she had ‘sort of’ made Lucy up. It was simply because there was no one else to play with, for Tabitha was five years older, and at least fifty-five times more sensible and intelligent and grown-up. So Jean Elspeth had pretended.

  In those days she would sometimes sit on one flowerpot on the long hot or windy terrace, and she would put another flowerpot for Lucy. And they would talk, or rather she would talk, and Lucy would look. Or sometimes they sat together in a corner of the great bare nursery. And sometimes Jean Elspeth would pretend she was holding Lucy’s hand when she fell asleep.

  And the really odd thing was that the less in those days she tried to ‘pretend’, the more often Lucy came. And though Jean Elspeth had never seen her with what is called her naked eye, she must have seen her with some other kind of eye, for she knew that her hair and skin were fairer than the fairest of flax, and that she was dressed in very light and queer-fashioned clothes, though she could not say how queer.

  Another odd thing was that Lucy always seemed to appear without warning entirely out of nothing, and entirely of herself, when anything mysterious or unexpected or sad or very beautiful happened, and sometimes just before it happened. That had been why she told Euphemia of her dream of the night before. For though everything else in the dream had been dark and dismal, and the water had roared furiously over its rocks, breaking into foam like snow, and Jean Elspeth had been shaken with terror, Lucy herself appearing at the window had been more beautiful than moonlight and as consoling as a star.