Short Stories for Children

by Walter De la Mare

  It was a pity, of course, that Jean Elspeth had ever even so much as mentioned Lucy at all. But that had been years and years ago, and then she could not really help doing so. For Tabitha had crept up behind her one morning – it was on her eighth birthday – while she herself was sitting in a corner by the large cupboard, with her back to the nursery door, and had overheard her talking to someone.

  ‘Aha! little Miss Toad-in-the-hole! So here you are! And who are you talking to?’ Tabitha had asked.

  Jean Elspeth had turned cold all over. ‘Nobody,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Nobody, is it? Then you just tell me, Madam Skulker, Nobody’s name!’

  And Jean Elspeth had refused. Unfortunately, she had been wearing that morning a high-waisted frock, with sleeves that came down only to the elbow, and though Tabitha, with nips and pinches of her bare skinny arm, could not make Jean Elspeth cry, she had at least made her tell.

  ‘Oh, so its name’s Lucy, is it?’ said Tabitha. ‘You horrid little frump. Then you tell her from me that if I catch her anywhere about, I’ll scratch her eyes out.’

  After another pinch or two, and a good ‘ring-of-the-bells’ at Jean Elspeth’s plait, Tabitha had gone downstairs to her father.

  ‘Papa,’ she said, ‘I am sorry to interrupt you, but I think poor Elspeth must be ill or in a fever. She is “rambling”. Had we better give her some Gregory’s powder, or some castor oil, do you think?’

  Mr MacKnackery had been worried that morning by a letter about a Gold Mine, something like that which poor Euphemia so many years afterwards was to receive from the Four Lawyers. But when he was worried he at once tried to forget his worry. Indeed, even at sight of what looked like an ugly letter, he would begin softly whistling and smiling. So it was almost with a sigh of relief that he pushed the uncomfortable letter into a drawer and climbed the stairs to the nursery.

  And when Jean Elspeth, after crying a little as she sat on his knee, had told him about Lucy, he merely smiled out of his dark eyes, and, poking his finger and thumb into a waistcoat pocket, had pulled out, just as if it had been waiting there especially for this occasion, a tiny little gold locket with a picture of a moss-rose inside, which he asked Jean Elspeth to give to Lucy the very next time she came again. ‘My dear,’ he had said, ‘I have my Lucy, too, though I never, never talk about her. I keep her “for best”.’

  As for Tabitha, he thanked her most gratefully that morning at luncheon for having been so thoughtful about her sister. ‘But I fear, my child,’ he said, ‘you must be fretting yourself without need. And for fretting there is nothing so good as Gregory’s powder. So I have asked Alison to mix a good dose for you at bed-time, and if you are very generous, perhaps Jenny would like to lick the spoon.’

  The very moment he turned his face away, with as dreadful a grimace as she could manage, Tabitha had put out her long pale tongue at Jean Elspeth – which was about as much use as it would have been to put out her tongue for their old doctor, Dr Menzies – after he had gone out of the room …

  Even now, years and years after she had become completely grown up, whenever Jean Elspeth thought of those far-away times she always began wool-gathering. And whenever she began wool-gathering Lucy was sure to seem more real to her than at any other time. The gravel path, the green lawn, the distant hills vanished away before her eyes. She was lost as if in a region of light and happiness. There she was happy to be lost. But spattering raindrops on her cheeks soon called her back to herself. A dark cloud had come over the world, and for the first time a foreboding came into her mind of what Euphemia’s letter might really mean.

  She turned sharply on the little green seat almost as if she had been caught trespassing. And at that instant she could have vowed that she actually saw – this time with her real naked eye – a child standing and looking at her a few paces beyond. It could not have been so, of course; but what most surprised Jean Elspeth was that there should be such a peculiar smile on the child’s face – as if she were saying: ‘Never mind, my dear. Whatever happens, whatever they say, I promise to be with you more than ever before. You just see!’

  And then, for the very first time in her life, Jean Elspeth felt ashamed of Lucy; and then, still more ashamed of being ashamed. When they were all in such trouble, was it quite fair to Euphemia and Tabitha? She actually went so far as to turn away in the opposite direction and would have hastened straight back to the house if, at that moment, she had not heard a small, curious fluttering behind her. She glanced swiftly over her shoulder, but it was to find only that a robin had stolen in on her to share her company, and was now eyeing her with his bead-black eye from his perch on the green seat which she had just vacated.

  And now, of course, there was no Lucy. Not a trace. She had been ‘dismissed’ – would never come back.

  For lunch that day the butler carried in a small soup-tureen of porridge. When he had attended to each of the ladies, and had withdrawn, Euphemia explained to Jean Elspeth precisely what the lawyers’ letter meant. It was a long letter, not only about the gentlemen who had failed to find water enough for their waterworks in Armenia, but also about some other gentlemen in Madagascar whose crops of manioc and caoutchouc had been seized with chor-blight. Jean Elspeth did not quite grasp the details; she did not quite understand why the lawyers had ever taken such a fancy to caoutchouc; but she did perfectly understand Euphemia’s last sentence: ‘So you see, Elspeth, we – that is Us – are ruined!’

  And would you believe it? Once more Jean Elspeth said the wrong thing. Or rather it was her voice that was wrong. For far away in it was the sound as of a bugle rejoicing at break of day. ‘And does that mean, Euphemia, that we shall have to leave Stoneyhouse?’

  ‘It means,’ said Tabitha tartly, ‘that Stoneyhouse may have to leave us.’

  ‘In either case we are powerless,’ added Euphemia. And the tone in which Euphemia uttered these words – sitting there straight and erect, with her long white face, in her sleek grey silk morning-gown with its pattern of tiny mauve flowers – brought tears, not to Jean Elspeth’s eyes, but to somewhere deep down inside her. It was as if somebody was drawing water out of the very well of her heart.

  ‘It is the disgrace,’ said Tabitha. ‘To have to turn our backs, to run away. We shall be the talk, the laughing-stock of the county.’

  ‘What! Laugh at us because we are ruined!’ cried Jean Elspeth.

  But this time Tabitha ignored her. ‘This is the house,’ she said, ‘our noble grandfather built for us. And here I will die, unless I am positively driven out of it by these systematic blood-suckers.’

  ‘Tabitha!’ pleaded Euphemia. ‘Surely we should not demean ourselves so far as even to call them by their right name.’

  ‘Systematic blood-suckers,’ cried Tabitha fiercely. ‘I will sell the very rings off my fingers rather than be an exile from the house where I was born. And he – he at least shall never witness the ruin into which our father’s folly has betrayed us.’

  She rose from the table, and mounting one of the expensive damask chairs that, unless guests were present, were accustomed to stand in a stately row along the wall, she succeeded, after one or two vain attempts, in turning the immense gilt-framed portrait of her grandfather with its face to the wall.

  Then tears really came into Jean Elspeth’s eyes. But they were tears of anger rather than of pity. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that is being dreadfully unkind to Father.’

  ‘By this time,’ said Tabitha sternly, ‘I should have supposed that you would have given up the notion that you are capable of “thinking”. What right have you to defend your father, pray, simply because you take after him?’

  Jean Elspeth made no answer. Her father at any rate continued to smile at her from his nail – though it was not a very good portrait, because the painter had been unable to get the hair and the waistcoat quite right. And if – even at this unhappy moment – Jean Elspeth had had her porridge spoon in her hand, she would certainly have given it a little secret wa
ve in his direction.

  But he was not to smile down for very long. The Miss MacKnackeries’s grandfather continued to hang with his face to the wall. But the two other portraits, together with the wardrobes, coffers, presses, sideboards, bead-mats, samplers, and even the Indian workboxes, were all taken off in a few weeks, to be sold for what they would fetch. And Euphemia now, instead of five, wore but one ring, and that of turquoises.

  In a month all the servants, from the butler to Sally McGullie, and all the gardeners were gone. Mrs O’Phrump alone remained – first because she was too stout to be likely to be comfortable in any new place, and next, because she wasn’t greedy about wages. That was all. Just Mrs O’Phrump and the gardener’s boy, Tom Piper, whose mother lived in the village, and who slept at home. But he was a lazy boy, was Tom Piper, and when he was not fast asleep in the tool-shed, he was loafing in the deserted orchard.

  Nevertheless, it was from this moment that Jean Elspeth seemed to have become completely alive.

  It was extraordinary to find herself so much herself in so empty a house. The echoes! Why, if you but walked alone along a corridor, you heard your own footsteps pit-a-pattering after you all the way down. If by yourself, in ‘your ain, ain companie’, you but laughed out in a room, it was like being the muffled clapper of a huge hollow bell. All Stoneyhouse seemed endlessly empty now; and perhaps the emptiest place of all was the coach-house.

  And then the stables. It was simply astonishing how quickly stray oats, that had fallen by chance into the crannies, sprang up green among the cobblestones in front of their walls. And if for a little while you actually stood in the stables beside one of the empty mangers, the call of a bird was as shrill as early cock-crow. And you could almost see ghostly horses with their dark eyes looking round at you out of their long narrow heads, as if to say: ‘So this is what you have done for us!’

  Not that Jean Elspeth had very much time to linger over such little experiences. No; and she seemed to have grown even smaller in the empty house. But she was ten times more active. And, though she tried not to be selfish by showing it, she was more than ten times happier. Between Jean Elspeth herself and the eagle-surmounted gateposts, indeed, she now secretly confessed that she had always hated Stoneyhouse. How very odd, then, that the moment it ceased to be a place in which any fine personage would be proud to be offered a pillow, she began to be friends with it. She began to pity it.

  No doubt Tabitha was right. Their grandfather would assuredly have ‘turned in his grave’, poor creature, at the sound of those enormous vans, those hideous pantechnicons, as their wheels ground down the gravel in the lingering twilight evenings. And yet, after all, that grandfather had been born – a fact that very much shocked Tabitha, whenever her father had smilingly related it – their grandfather had been born in a two-roomed cottage so cramped that, if only you could have got it through the window, it would have fitted quite comfortably even into the breakfast-room of the great house he had lived to build.

  Then there had been not two bawbees in his breeches pocket, and – having been such a good man, as both Euphemia and Tabitha agreed – he did not need a bawbee now. Would he then – once the pantechnicons were out of the way – would he, thought Jean Elspeth, have been so very miserable to see all this light and sunshine in the house and to listen to these entrancing echoes.

  There were other advantages, too. It was easy to sweep the dining-room now; and much easier to dust it. And one day, more out of kindness than curiosity, after busily whisking over its gilt frame with her feather cornice-broom, Jean Elspeth climbed on to a chair, and, tilting it, looked in at the portrait. A spider had spun its web in one corner, but otherwise (it was almost disappointing) the picture was unchanged. Nor had Mr MacKnackery yet taken his watch out of his pocket, even though (for his three granddaughters at any rate) the time was now – well, a good way past a quarter to twelve.

  Jean Elspeth had had ridiculous thoughts like these as long as she could remember. But now they came swarming into her head like midsummer bees into a hive. Try as she might, she could not keep them all to herself, and though on this account alone Tabitha seemed to dislike her more than ever, Euphemia seemed sometimes to wish for her company. But then Euphemia was by no means well. She had begun to stoop a little, and sometimes did not hear what was said to her. To watch her visibly grow older like this gave Jean Elspeth dreadful anxiety. Still, in most things – and she all but said it out loud every morning at her first early look out of her upper window – she was far happier than when Stoneyhouse stood in all its glory. It seemed rather peculiar, but it was true.

  Also, there was no time to be anything else; and even if there had been a complete cupboard full of neat packages of time saved, she would have used them all up in a week. Euphemia, being so poorly, did very little. She helped to make the beds and with the mending. Only the mending, for, fortunately, the making of any new clothes would be unnecessary for years and years to come; they had so many old ones. Tabitha did what she could manage of the lighter work, but although she had a quick tongue, she had slow, clumsy hands. And it is quite certain, though nobody, natually, would have been so unkind as to say so, that she would never have got even as low wages as Sally McGullie, if she had been in need of a place.

  Mrs O’Phrump did the cooking; but sat on a chair in the kitchen for so many hours together that she became almost like a piece of furniture herself – the heaviest piece in the house. For the cooking of water-porridge and potatoes does not require very much time, and these were now pretty much all that the Miss MacKnackeries had to eat, except for the eggs from Jean Elspeth’s three Cochin-Chinas. And Mrs O’Phrump needed most of these, as there was so much of her to sustain. As for the apples and pears in the orchard, since Mrs O’Phrump was too stout to stoop to make dumplings, Jean Elspeth, having two wonderful rows of small sharp teeth, shared these raw with Tom Piper – though he had all the stomach-aches.

  All the rest of the work fell to Jean Elspeth. She slaved from morning till night. And to slave the more merrily, she had taught herself to whistle. She never asked herself why she was so happy. And no doubt it was chiefly by contrast with having been so cramped in, and kept under, and passed over in days gone by.

  Still, certain things did now happen in Stoneyhouse that had not happened before, and some of these may have helped. For one thing, Jean Elspeth had always dreaded ‘company’. Dressing-up made her feel awkward. The simplest stranger made her shy. She much preferred the company even of her two sisters. None came now, except Dr Menzies, who of his kindness sometimes called to feel Euphemia’s pulse and mutter, ‘H’m h’m’ – though he did not charge for it.

  Jean Elspeth, too, had never liked servants, not because they were servants, but because Euphemia and Tabitha seemed to think they oughtn’t to be talked to much. Just given their orders. Now Jean Elspeth could easily have given everything else in the world: but not orders. And if there ever had been an interesting creature in Stoneyhouse, even though she was so stupid in some things, it was Sally McGullie.

  Then, again, Jean Elspeth, being by nature desperately untidy, never showed it now. For it’s all but impossible to be untidy in a room that contains only a table and three chairs!

  Then, yet again, Jean Elspeth, before the gentlemen in Armenia and Madagascar had been disappointed in their waterworks and caoutchouc, had had very little to do. She was scarcely even allowed to read. For Tabitha was convinced that most reading was a waste of time, and trash at that; while improving books had never the least bit improved Jean Elspeth. But now she had so many things to do that it was a perfect joy to fit them all in (like the pieces of a puzzle). And the perfectest joy of all was to scramble into her truckle bed, which had formerly been Sally McGullie’s bed, and, with a tallow candle stuck by its own grease to the left-hand knob, to read and read and read.

  The hours she spent like this, with no living company but roving mice and flitting moths and, in autumn, perhaps a queen wasp. When her upper parts grew c
old in winter weather, she spread her skirt over the quilt. One thin blanket, indeed, is not much comfort on cold nights when one is lying up north there, almost in positive view of the Grumpy Ones. As for her feet, she used to boil some water in the great solitary kitchen in a kettle and fill a wine-bottle.

  This, of course, broke a good many bottles; and it was an odd thing that until there was only one left, Tabitha (whose feet were like slabs of ice) refused to hear of anything so vulgar. And then she changed her mind. And medicine-bottles are too small.

  Apart from all this, queer things now happened in Stoneyhouse. Little things, but entrancing. The pantechnicon men, for example, had broken a window on a lower staircase as they were heaving down old Mr MacKnackery’s best wardrobe. A sweetheart pair of robins in the springtime noticed this hole, and decided to build their nest in a nook of the cornice. Jean Elspeth (with her tiny whistling) was accepted as the bosom friend of the whole family.

  There was, too, a boot cupboard, one too far from the kitchen for Mrs O’Phrump to range. Its window had been left open. And when, by chance, Jean Elspeth looked in one sunny afternoon, there hung within it a marvellous bush of Traveller’s Joy, rather pale in leaf, but actually flowering there; and even a butterfly sipping of its nectar. After that, not a day passed now but she would peep in at this delicate green visitor, and kiss her hand. It was, too, an immense relief to Jean Elspeth to have said good-bye for ever to lots of things in the house that seemed to her to have been her enemies ever since she was five years old.

  She wandered up into rooms she had never seen before, and looked out of windows whose views had never before lain under her eyes. Nor did she cease to day-dream, but indulged in only tiny ones that may come and go, like swifts, between two ticks of a clock. And although, of course, Tabitha strongly disapproved of much that delighted Jean Elspeth now, there was not nearly so much time in which to tell her so.