Short Stories for Children

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Short Stories for Children Page 35

by Walter De la Mare


  The street was still, and, at this early hour of the morning, almost deserted. For a while, firm as a rock, he continued so to stand. But having failed to catch a glimpse of what he was after, he began to survey a little vacantly the pictures chalked on the stones at his feet.

  The first of them was of a ship with bare masts and lanky spars, tossing on an indigo sea, its waves yeastily crested with spray. Next to this there was a windmill in a gaudy country green, the miller himself standing up like Shem, Ham, and Japhet at the little rounded door above the wide wooden ladder. Next, there was a gaping brace of rainbow-coloured, rather flabby-looking mackerel. Next, a loaf of bread, a cut cheese, and a neat little long-tailed mouse at her supper. And last – and best of all to some tastes – there stood a lonely country mansion among its wintry trees, a wild full moon gleaming down on its walls. Scrawled beneath this picture, in a flowery lettering, was the one word, ‘HORNTED’.

  Admiral Rumbold had taken a good long look at these pictures only the evening before. They showed a little livelier in the morning sunshine. Still, he had come back not to have another look at them, but to have a word with the young artist. Few street chalkers, the Admiral had noticed in his walks abroad, are much less than forty. The one he now had in mind could not be more than fourteen. The Admiral had taken a liking to him at first sight, had often watched him at his work, and had dropped many a tuppence into the old cloth cap that usually lay (as if with its mouth wide open) beside the pictures. Now he wished to speak to him.

  To an old gentleman with a temper as peppery as the Admiral’s it was therefore an unpleasant jar to find that when he wanted the boy he was nowhere to be seen. Besides, he was anxious to get rid of the brown-paper parcel under his arm. He had a dislike to carrying anything at all – even an umbrella so massive that it looked more like a war-club. On the other hand he was a man who, having once made up his mind, kept it made up.

  He crossed the street, and spent the next few minutes pacing solemnly up and down, glancing ever and again as he did so down the area railings or up at the upper windows of the houses on that side of it, in order to pretend to himself that he was not being kept waiting. And every time he turned smartly on his heel, he glared first up the street, then down the street, and then into the deep-blue empty sky.

  At last he had his reward. Shuffling along close to the railings from out of a neighbouring alley, in shoes that even at this distance looked a good deal more roomy than comfortable, appeared the boy the Admiral was in wait for. A coat that was at least two sizes too large for its present wearer hung down from his bony shoulders. But he had turned the cuffs up over the sleeves, so that his claw-like hands came out free from beneath them.

  His odd, almost ugly face was pale and not too clean. His brown hair was lank and tousled. But as the Admiral had noticed before, the skull beneath the hair was nut-shaped and compact, clear over the forehead and wide towards the back. It looked as if it closely fitted something valuable inside it. Besides which, the boy had a pair of eyes in the pinched face looking out from under that skull, which once seen were not easily forgotten.

  Admiral Rumbold, at sight of him, had slipped in under the carved shell-shaped porch of one of the neighbouring houses. From here he could see without being seen.

  First, the boy glanced into his cap, then took it up, turned it upside down, shook it, and replaced it on the pavement. He then drew a large dingy rag out of his pocket, that might once have been the flap of a man’s shirt or a woman’s petticoat. With both hands he waved this to and fro above his pictures to waft away the dust and straw and soot-smuts. He then pushed the rag into his pocket again, and had a steady look at the pictures, as if he had never seen them before and could not make up his mind whether or not to give himself a penny. He then sighed – a sigh that in the morning quietness was clearly audible. At this Admiral Rumbold stepped out of his hiding-place, crossed the road, and accosted him.

  ‘Good morning, my boy,’ was his greeting. ‘How’s business?’

  The boy looked up into the round red face of the old gentleman, with its small beak-like nose and sky-blue eyes, and a timid smile passed over his own as he shook his head.

  ‘So, so!’ said Admiral Rumbold bluffly. ‘Nothing much, eh? There’s a bit of east in the wind this morning, and perhaps that keeps folk moving. Or perhaps… Well, there we are! Had any breakfast? No? Good! I want a word with ’ee. Is there a place handy where we can sit and talk?’

  The boy coloured, glanced swiftly from right to left, and told the Admiral of a coffee-shop near at hand where he sometimes went himself. Then he looked up at the old Admiral again, became redder than ever, and broke off.

  ‘Full steam ahead, then,’ said his friend. ‘And do you lead the way.’

  The boy buttoned his coat: away they went together; and in a minute or two the pair of them were sitting face to face on two benches between wooden partitions – like the high pews in old churches – and on either side of a table in an eating-house halfway up the neighbouring alley. The Admiral asked the boy what he would take. He said a mug of thick.

  At this the Admiral cocked one of his bright blue eyes, and enquired if he would like anything to eat with it. The boy hesitated, and suggested a door-step.

  ‘H’m!’ said the Admiral, ‘and anything for a sweet tooth to follow?’

  The boy said he would like a cat’s-eye. Whereupon Admiral Rumbold rapped smartly on the table. A man with greasy black hair, of a dark face, and wearing a rather dingy apron, appeared from his den behind the shop.

  ‘Good-morning,’ said the Admiral. ‘Two mugs of thick, a door-step, and a cat’s-eye.’ And he said the words as if he had been used to them all his life and knew exactly what they meant.

  The mugs of thick proved to be cocoa; the door-step a slab of bread with a scrimp of butter; and the cat’s-eye was a large yellow bun with a burnt raisin stuck in its crown. And while the two of them sipped their thick, and the boy from nibbling went on to munching at his door-step, Admiral Rumbold explained what he was after.

  But first he asked him a little about himself and his work. He learned that the boy was pretty well alone in the world. His father, who had been a carriage painter, had died when he was six. His own business was fair in fine weather, but it was hard to find a pitch where there were neither too many passers-by nor too few. ‘And then there’s the bobbies,’ said the boy. Summer was better than winter, but up to the last week or two there had been too much rain for any business at all.

  ‘Ay, ay,’ said the Admiral, looking at him over the thick brim of his mug as he took another sip of cocoa, ‘a fine-weather trade, I take it.’ And he asked him what his name was. It was Mike.

  ‘Well now, Mike,’ said Admiral Rumbold at last, ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you for some little time. I’ve been wanting to keep an eye on someone of your age and looks for a good deal longer. I like your pictures; in fact, I admire them. If I were to sit down under that wall with every scrap of chalk you’ve got and do my level best with them, rain or no rain, I warrant my takings wouldn’t be fourpence a month. It’s the knack you want. And it’s the knack, my lad, you have.

  ‘Not, mind you,’ he went on, ‘that I know any more about pictures than what I like. I leave the rest to them that do. But I’ve lived a good many years in the world now, and my belief is that every walk in life begins with a steepish bit of hill. When I was a boy – and we’re not concerned just now with where my walk’s led me – I had to face mine. And in this parcel here is – well, what helped me in the climbing of it.

  ‘Here,’ repeated the Admiral and said no more for the moment. For he had brought his square solid hand down on the parcel beside his mug with such a thump that the man in the apron came hurrying up to see what more was wanted.

  ‘I’ll have,’ said the Admiral promptly, ‘another mug of thick and another couple of door-steps. And this time put in a slice or two more of beef and bacon by way of cement.’

  The sandwiches that followed w
ere almost as much meat as bread, and Mike’s eyes fairly watered as they were handed over to him.

  ‘In this parcel, as I was saying,’ continued the Admiral, ‘is the story of what I’ve been telling you. A yarn, you’ll understand. Tell me, can you read?’ Mike nodded violently; his mouth was full.

  ‘Good!’ said the Admiral. ‘All I want you to do is to read it – it’s about a jacket – what might be called a slice out of my early days, just as that bacon there may be a slice out of the early days of the pig it came from. There’s no hurry——’ he glanced at the clock and then at his gold repeater – ‘it’s seventeen and a half minutes past ten. Sit here quietly and read as much of it as you can. When you have finished, come along to me. At eleven sharp I’ll be waiting near the pitch.

  ‘Mind ye,’ he ended as he rose to his feet, ‘there’s no shadow of must in that package whatsoever. Nor do I vouch for anything beyond what’s written – and I’ve had it printed out on one of those new-fangled machines so that it can be read plain and easy. Take it quietly; ask for anything you want while I’m away; and in half an hour we meet again.’

  He put down half-a-crown on the table for the door-steps, etc, laid his hand an instant on Mike’s shoulder, and looked him hard but friendly in the eye. Then he instantly flung open the swing-door of the coffee-shop and went out into the street.

  To judge from his face, the old gentleman was very well pleased with himself at this moment. He returned to the pictures, and spent the next half-hour, as cautiously as before, in pacing to and fro along the street. Whenever he passed them he paused to look at them, dropped a copper or two into the cap, and went on. At this, some curious passer-by would also stop and glance over Mike’s gallery. And, maybe, he too would fling in a penny to join the Admiral’s – and, maybe, not.

  Meanwhile, Mike, left to himself and now the only customer in the coffee-shop, took a good long swig of his mug of cocoa and a munch at his sandwich before setting to work on the Admiral’s story. And this was what he read:

  ‘Coming down to facts at once, I was born all but seventy years ago, in a town in Shropshire of the name of P——. My father was a grocer – retail. His shop wasn’t much to look at from outside, but there was little that his customers wanted in the way of groceries that couldn’t be found even then on his shelves.

  ‘My father was a man of about forty when I came into the world. My mother was a good deal younger; and mightily pleased they were to have me. No doubt about that. They christened me Andrew and called me Sandy, there being Scotch blood on my father’s side. And if hard work and steady is a short cut to success, that was my father’s way.

  ‘At first, my father and mother were content to live over the shop – three rooms in all, not including one not much bigger than a bandbox, which was called the nursery. When I was six, things were going so well with the business that they decided to let the rooms above the shop, and to move into a small but comfortable, high and (what they call) semi-detached house, half a mile or so out of the town. We had a good strip of garden there – a few apple and plum trees, some currant and gooseberry bushes, and old country flowers.

  ‘My mother loved that garden, and spent all the time she could spare from the house in it, with me beside her, or digging away at a patch of soil, three yards by one, with scallop shells round the border, which she let me have to do what I pleased with. That was my garden. Sandy-land, she called it. Candytuft, Virginia stock, and Sweet Williams were my own particular crops.

  ‘My mother, I remember, bless her soul, was a great talker. I don’t mean by this that she talked too much, or talked to everybody, or never listened. I mean she was a great talker to me, though not so much to my father. What she and I chattered about when we went out shopping in the morning together, or when I used to help her make the beds, would fill a book. Everything under the sun, not to mention the other side of it.

  ‘I don’t know what there was about my mother – brown eyes, brown hair, and so on. But hanging up over the pianoforte in what was called our drawing-room was a portrait of her as a girl of eighteen or thereabouts which if I had been any kind of young man with an eye in his head I should have fallen in love with at first sight. But it wasn’t her looks; it was her ways. How to put it I don’t know, but she always seemed to be talking as if to somebody over her shoulder as well as to me myself.

  ‘Never – and mine’s a pretty long life now – never have I come across anyone with such a loving delight in birds, flowers, trees, clouds, stars, moss, butterflies, and all that. She knew them by heart. You might have thought she’d had a hand in their making. Words aren’t my tools, and I must just get things down as straight as I can. But that was the way of it. To see her look at a toadstool, with some bright colour to its gills, or peep into a wren’s or chaffinch’s nest, or stand watching a bevy of long-tailed tits gossiping together for a minute or two in one of our tufted old apple trees on their way to somebody else’s, was like – well, I don’t know what it wasn’t like, except that it was like nothing on earth but my mother. She wasn’t any age at all. We might have been a couple of brothers or sisters – old cronies, as you might say. We could hardly tell each other apart – except when my father was by.

  ‘Now, I’m not going to say anything against him. He died when I was not much more than a quarter of the way up the ladder I was afterwards to set myself to climb. He did his best by me; and if it hadn’t been for my own stubborn interference, he might have done better for me than I’ve done for myself. Can’t say; don’t know. What I wanted was to go my own way, as at last I went. And your own way is nobody else’s way. It’s a man’s self – his innards, to speak abruptly – that counts. Not the stripes on his arm, or the cut of his jib, or the cash in his bank, or even what he’s done.

  ‘But enough of that. The truth is perhaps that being so much alone with my mother, and as contented in her company, at least in those first few years, as a butterfly with a flower, I became a bit of an apron-string child. She did not much care for going out, and she had a mighty small opinion of any young Two-Legs in the street except the one she herself had brought into the world, so I was only allowed to play with any small Tom, Dick, or Harry belonging to our neighbours provided I never went beyond view of her bedroom window. And that’s not much of a playground for a healthy young sprat that ought to be learning what the sea looks like.

  ‘Alone with her, and at peace, I wanted nothing else and could chatter away like a grasshopper. Away from her, I was usually little better than a tongue-tied numskull, flushing up to the eyebrows at a word from a stranger, and looked too shy and timid to say Boh to a goose – even to the goose in my own looking-glass! Well, numskull is as numskull does; and as the old wooden-legged sailor said,

  When all you’ve got is a couple of stump,

  There’s nowt to do but go clump – clump – clump!

  ‘My father could not see it that way. He began to think I was stupid on purpose. There was not a sharper tradesman in the county, nor a more honest tradesman either, in spite of the “sharp”. All his wits were at his finger-tips. He had a memory like a dictionary. He knew where everything was or ought to be. He could tell a bargain at first wag of its tail and a good customer before he opened his mouth. He lived long enough to make three fine shops of his poky first one – plate-glass windows, plenty of gold paint, three smart vans and about a dozen glossy-haired assistants in clean white aprons. And he stowed a handsomer show of tea-chests, sugar loaves, jam-jars and piccalilli pots behind those windows than any other grocer in the town. I owe him unspeakably more than the little fortune he left me.

  ‘But being what he was, he was impatient with anything else, and particularly with me, his own son. Now, I understand it. Then, the moment I saw his black hat above the hedge, or heard his key in the lock, I would scuttle away like a frightened rabbit. If we were left alone together, I would sit as glum as a cold plum-duff pudding – without any plums in it! If he asked me a question, every word would fly out of my
head, like rooks at a rattle. The mere look of me at such times – fumbling and stammering – made him angry. The more angry he grew the more tongue-tied and lumpish grew I, and that would set my poor mother weeping. And I have never yet met a father who enjoyed being told that he could not understand his own son. Not that he loved me a penny the less; far from it. But love, my boy, is like coal. You can burn it, and warm and comfort yourself with its light and heat. Or you can keep it in a cellar. My father kept his in a cellar – and it was I who helped him stack it up!

  ‘With my mother, as I have said already, everything was different. We would gossip away together for hours. And when she wasn’t with me I would talk to myself. I had plenty of books in my bedroom under the roof – books that had belonged to my mother’s younger brother who died at sea. And I read like a limpet. When in those days I opened a book that seemed meant for me – travels, voyages, that kind of thing – it was like exploring another world. Fancy tales I never took to – except journeys to the moon, or the middle of the earth, and suchlike – nor could even my mother win me to rhymes.

  ‘Maybe it was all this book-stuff and solitude and having nobody to play with that began this odd habit in me of talking to myself when I was alone. And it was this talking to myself that led on to the great discovery. One evening, I remember, I was reading about the supper to which Sir Francis Drake invited the officer on his ship who had been stirring up mutiny against him, and whom he hanged next morning. And as I was listening to myself talking like the officer and putting up as stiff a lip as I could at the prospect of so harsh a breakfast, I suddenly discovered that there was not one of me, so to say, but two. I discovered what’s called a second self – though of course he must have been there all the time. To make things plain and ship-shape, let us call the first of these two selves, Sandy One; and the second of these two selves, Sandy Two.

 

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