Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Now, supposing, Miss Lacey, my dear,’ began Mr Sully shrewdly, half-closing his eyes as if to gloss over his finesse, ‘supposing a young man, a nice, curly-headed young man – just about our old friend’s age here’ – Miss Lacey, with a kind of arch and sympathetic good nature, leaned a large, dark head to glance at Mr Eaves – ‘supposing a nice young gentleman – just as it might be our old friend himself here – came, like an innocent, to entrust to your blessed bosom a secret – a sacred secret: what would you do?’

  ‘Lor’ bless me, Mr Sully, sir, is that all you was coming to! A secret? Why, keep it, to be sure; and not the first time neether.’ Miss Lacey advanced to the bar, black, precise and cheerful, with the two small, thick glasses in her hand.

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Sully, with an almost professional abandon. ‘Good. So far. But step number two; supposing, my dear, you couldn’t for the life and love of you help him in his little difficulty – dependent on his secret, let’s say – what then?’

  ‘Why, I’d keep it all the more,’ cried Miss Lacey brightly.

  ‘A woman’s answer, Eaves; and none the worse for that,’ said Mr Sully. ‘But on the other hand, supposing you were a practical’ – he paused with the little water-jug hovering an inch or two above his friend’s glass – ‘supposing you were a practical, unromantic old blackguard like me – why, you’d go and tell it to the first lovely blooming creature that came along.’ He eyed her steadily yet jocosely. ‘And that’s why I’m going to tell it to you, my dear!’

  ‘How you do tease, to be sure!’ said Miss Lacey. ‘He’s a real tease, isn’t he, Mr Eaves?’

  Mr Sully’s eyes suddenly sobered with overwhelming completeness. He pointed coldly with his stick. ‘He’s been dreaming of hell,’ he said.

  Mr Eaves, on his part, withdrew large, weak, colourless eyes from the uneasy head of the commissionaire, and turned them on Miss Lacey. She glanced at him swiftly, then stooped, and took up a piece of sewing she had laid down on her wooden chair, in the little out-of-the-way bar.

  ‘I don’t approve of such subjecs,’ she said, ‘treated frivolous.’

  ‘Gracious goodness, Eaves,’ said Mr Sully, ‘she says “frivolous”. Hell – “frivolous”!’

  ‘Why,’ said Miss Lacey lucidly, ‘I’m not so green as I look.’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t look younger, if being young’s to be green,’ said Mr Sully; ‘and as sure, my dear, as that was a flash of lightning, it – it’s the real thing.’

  When the faint but cumulative rumble of thunder that followed had subsided, Miss Lacey seemed to have withdrawn her attention. Mr Sully edged slowly round on his feet and faced his friend. ‘You old skeleton at the feast! You’ve alarmed the poor child,’ he said.

  Miss Lacey spoke without raising her eyes, bent closely on her needle. ‘Not me,’ she said; ‘but I don’t hold with such ideas.’

  ‘Tell her yourself,’ said Mr Sully to his friend; “tell her yourself; they never will believe me.”

  Mr Eaves shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ said Mr Sully.

  ‘God bless me,’ said Mr Eaves, with sudden heat, ‘I’m old enough to be her father.’

  Miss Lacey looked up over her sewing. ‘You’d scarcely believe me,’ she said mysteriously; ‘but there was a young gentleman down Charles Street, where I used to be, that had dreams – well, there, shocking! Nobody but me had the patience to listen to him. But you can’t give all your attention to one customer, can you? He,’ she cast a curious glance into the shadows brooding over the commissionaire – ‘he got up out of his bed one night, just as you or me might – he was living in private apartments, too – struck a match, so they said, and cut his throat. Awful. From ear to ear!’ Her thimbled finger made a demure half-circuit of the large pearls of her necklace.

  Mr Sully gazed roundly. ‘Did he, though? But there, you see,’ and he leant in great confidence over the counter, ‘Mr Eaves here doesn’t shave!’

  Mr Eaves smiled vaguely, half-lifting his stick, as if in coquettish achnowledgement of his friend’s jest.

  ‘No, no, old friend,’ he said, ‘not that, not that, I hope.’

  ‘Gracious goodness,’ said Mr Sully cordially, ‘he mustn’t take it to heart like that. A dream’s a dream.’

  ‘Why, of course, it is,’ said Miss Lacey. ‘You ought to take more care of yourself, sir; didn’t he, Mr Sully?’

  Mr Eaves gazed dispassionately, and yet with some little dignity, in the isolation of attention he had evoked. He turned slowly towards the bar, and stooped a little – confidentially. ‘Not once, not twice,’ he said ruminatingly, ‘but every blessed night. Every blessed night.’

  Miss Lacey eyed him with searching friendliness.

  ‘Tell her,’ said Mr Sully, walking slowly and circumspectly to the door, and peeping out through the cranny into the darkened street.

  Mr Eaves put his empty glass deliberately upon the counter, drew his hand slowly across his mouth and shook his head. ‘It’s nothing to tell, when you come to that. And …’ he nodded a questioning head towards the solitary occupant of the other bar.

  ‘Oh, fast; bless you,’ said Miss Lacey. ‘As reg’lar as clockwork – you’d hardly believe it.’

  ‘He’ll break his neck, some day,’ remarked Mr Sully tersely, ‘with that jerking.’

  ‘You see, my dear,’ continued Mr Eaves trustfully, ‘I don’t mind my old friend, Mr Sully, making a good deal of fun at my expense. He always has: eh, Sully? But he doesn’t see. You don’t see, Sully. There the thing is; and truth all over it. Facts are facts – in my belief.’

  ‘But fire and brimstone, and suchlike; oh no!’ said Miss Lacey with a dainty little shudder. ‘I can’t credit it, reelly; oh no! And poor innocent infants, too! You may think of me what you like, but nothing’ll make me believe that.’

  Mr Sully looked over his shoulder at Mr Eaves. ‘Oh, that,’ said his old friend, ‘was only Mr Sully’s fun. He says it’s Hell. I didn’t. My dream was only – after; the state after death, as they call it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Miss Lacey, lucidly, summoning all her intelligence into her face.

  Mr Eaves leaned forward, and all but whispered the curious tidings into her ear. ‘It’s – it’s just the same,’ he said.

  ‘The same?’ echoed Miss Lacey. ‘What?’

  ‘The same,’ repeated the old man, drawing back, and looking out of his long, grey, meaningless face at the little plump, bright, satiny woman.

  ‘Hell?’ breathed Miss Lacey.

  ‘“The state after death”,’ called Mr Sully, still peering into the gloom – and stepped back rather hurriedly in the intense pale lilac illumination of a sudden flickering blaze of lightning.

  Thunder now clanged directly overhead, and still Mr Eaves gazed softly yet earnestly into nothingness, as if in deep thought.

  ‘Whatever you like to call it,’ he began again steadily pushing his way, ‘that’s how I take it. I sit with my wife, all just the same; cap and “front” and all, just the same; gas burning, decanter on the table, books in the case, marble clock on the mantelpiece, just the same. Or perhaps I’m walking in the street, just the same; carts and shops and dogs, all just the same. Or perhaps I’m here, same as I might be now; with Sully there, and you there, and him there,’ he nodded towards the commissionaire. ‘All just the same. For ever, and ever, and ever.’ He raised his empty glass to his lips, and glanced almost apologetically towards his old friend. ‘For ever, and ever,’ he repeated, and put it down again.

  ‘He simply means,’ said Mr Sully, ‘no change. Like one of those blessed things on the movies; over and over again, click, click, click, click, click; you know. I tell him it’s his sentence, my dear.’

  ‘But if it’s the same,’ Miss Lacey interposed, with a little docile frown of confusion, ‘then what’s different?’

  ‘Mark me, Eaves, my boy,’ cried Mr Sully softly at the door; ‘it’s the ladies for brains, after all. That’s what they call a poser. “What
’s different”, eh?’

  Mr Eaves pondered in a profound internal silence in the bar. And beyond the windows, the rain streamed steadily in a long-drawn gush of coolness and peace. ‘What’s different?’ repeated Mr Sully, rocking infinitesimally on his heels.

  ‘Why,’ said Mr Eaves, ‘it seems as if there I can’t change either; can’t. If you were to ask me how I know – why, I couldn’t say. It’s a dream. But that’s what’s the difference. There’s nothing to come. Now: why! I might change in a score of ways; just take them as they come. I might fall ill; or Mrs Eaves might. I might come into some money; marry again. God bless me, I might die! But there, that’s all over; endless; no escape; nothing. I can’t even die. I’m just meself, Miss Lacey; Sully, old friend. Just meself, for ever, and ever. Nothing but me looking on at it all, if you take me – just what I’ve made of it. It’s my’ – his large pale eyes roved aimlessly – ‘it’s just what Mr Sully says, I suppose; it’s my sentence. Eh, Sully? wasn’t that it? My sentence?’ He smiled courageously.

  ‘Sentence, oh no! Sentence? You!’ cried Miss Lacey incredulously. ‘How could you, Mr Sully? Sentence! Whatever for, sir?’

  Mr Eaves again glanced vaguely at the sleeper, and then at his friend’s round substantial shoulders, rigidly turned on him. He fixed his eyes on the clock.

  ‘You’ve never done no harm, Mr Eaves!’ cried Miss Lacey, almost as if in entreaty.

  ‘You see,’ said the old gentelman, glancing over his shoulder, ‘it isn’t what you do: so I seem to take it.’ Mr Sully half turned from the door, as if to listen. ‘It’s what you are,’ said Mr Eaves, as if to himself.

  ‘Why, according to that,’ said Miss Lacey, in generous indignation, ‘who’s safe?’

  A day of close and tepid weather followed the storm. But it was on the evening of the next day after that – an evening of limpid sunshine and peace, the sparrows chirping shrilly in the narrow lights and shadows of the lane, that Mr Sully came in to see Miss Lacey.

  She was alone: and singing a little quiet tune to herself as she went about her business. He shook his head when she held up two glasses; and raised just one forefinger.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no!’ cried Miss Lacey.

  ‘This morning … in his sleep.’ He gazed at her with an unusual – with a curiously fish-like concentration.

  ‘Poor, poor gentleman,’ said Miss Lacey. ‘He was a gentleman, too; and no mistake. Never a hard word for nobody; man, woman, or child. A kind good gentleman – always the same. But it’s shocking. Well, well. But how dreadfully sudden, Mr Sully, sir!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Mr Sully almost irritably. ‘And if so, where’s the change?’ His round shoulders seemed with slight effort almost to shrug themselves.

  ‘Goodness gracious,’ Miss Lacey cried, ‘you don’t mean – you don’t mean to think – you don’t say it’s true? What he was telling us, Mr Sully?’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ her visitor replied vaguely, almost stubbornly. ‘Where else, after all, knowing all that, why, where else could he go?’

  ‘Mr Eaves, Mr Sully? Him? oh, no!’

  Mr Sully, in the intense clear quiet of the bar, continued to stare at her in a manner something like that of an over-glutted vulture. He nodded.

  Miss Lacey’s kind brown eyes suddenly darkened as if with a gust of storm. ‘But, then, what about us?’ she cried piteously, and yet with the tenderest generosity.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Sully, opening the door, and looking out into the sunny evening air, ‘if you ask me, that’s merely a question of time.’

  1 As printed in The Picnic and Other Stories (1941). First published in Saturday Westminster Gazette, 19 April 1913.

  Lispet, Lispett and Vaine1

  Maunders’s little clear morning town was busy with dogs and tradesmen and carriages. It wore an almost child-like vivacity and brightness, as if overnight it had been swept and garnished for entranceable visitors from over the sea. And there – in the blowy sunshine, like some grotesque Staffordshire figure on a garret chimney-piece – there, at the street corner, sat so ludicrous an old man that one might almost have described him as mediaeval.

  A peak cap, of a slightly marine, appearance, was drawn down over his eyes. Beneath it, wisps of grey hair and a thin beard helplessly shook in the wind; and before him stood a kind of gaping wallet, of cracked American cloth, held yawningly open by its scissor-legs. From this receptacle, ever and again, he extracted a strand of his dyed bast, or dubiously rummaged in its depths for his scissors. Whereupon he would gingerly draw the strand between his lips – a movement that positively set one’s teeth on edge – and at the same moment he would cast a bleared, long, casual glance first down the street to his right – High Street; and then up the street to his left – Mortimer Street; as the bast drew him round.

  I had watched him awhile from under the canvas window-blind of Lister Owlett’s, the Curio Shop, in which my friend Maunders was chaffering with a dark sardonic-looking man over a piece of Sheffield plate, and, at last, with that peculiar mixture of shame, compassion, amusement, and horror which such ineffectual (though possibly not unhappy) beings produce on one, I had crossed the road and had purchased an absurd little doll bast marketing basket. Oddly, too, after I had actually selected my specimen, and had even paid its price, the queer remote old creature had insisted on my taking a rather more ornate example of his wares …

  ‘You know, Maunders,’ I said, when we were a hundred yards or so beyond the old gentleman’s pitch, ‘this thing isn’t at all badly made. The pattern is rather pretty, and there’s a kind of useless finish to it. There’s still something to be said for the amateur. Anyhow, Bettie will like it.’

  Maunders turned his long, large, palish face of his and looked at me with his extraordinary eyes. For the ninety-ninth time at least I noticed that their faint blue and his necktie’s azure called each to each, as deep calls to deep.

  ‘Amateur!’ he echoed blandly, though a peculiar fixity of attention had gathered into his gaze; ‘why, that old gentleman is the last of – of the Lispets.’ He turned his head away – a queer-shaped, heavy head – and added: ‘Quite the last.’

  ‘Lispets, Maunders; what are they?’

  “My dear K —, believe me,’ said Maunders almost mincingly, ‘not everything is a jest. You must now have trodden the streets of this small town at least a dozen times. The Works – what remains of them – are not seven miles off. And yet, here you are, pleasantly fluting that you have lived a life of such obscurity as never to have heard of Lispet, Lispett and Vaine’s. It’s an affectation. I can scarcely forgive you. Nor will Henrietta.’

  He was – as usual – gently thrusting-out before him his handsome malacca cane in a manner which frequently persuaded approaching pedestrians that he was blind. And he repeated sotto voce, and as if out of an ocean of reflection,’ “Lispet, Lispett and Vaine; Mercers to Their Majesties …” I wish I could remember exactly how the old title went. In latter times, I mean.’

  ‘Who were “their Majesties,” then?’

  ‘“Their Majesties”?’ said Maunders. ‘Oh, mere kings and queens. In the Firm’s heyday they were, of course, the crowned heads of practically the whole barbaric globe. But what is history – mummified fact; desiccated life; the irretrievable. You are merely one of the crowd who care not tuppence for such things. The present generation – with its Stores and Emporiums and Trusts and “Combines” – is blind to the merest inkling of what the phrase Merchant Prince implies. We are not even conscious of irony in little Tommy Tucker’s Nation of Shopkeepers. Other times, better manners. The only “entirely honest merchant” of late years – so far as I have definitely heard – is bones in Shirley graveyard. Still, the Lispet tradition was not one of mere honesty.’

  ‘What, then,’ said I.

  ‘Well, in the first place,’ replied Maunders, sliding me a remote ruminative glance, ‘it rambles back almost to prehistoric times. You may hunt down t
he aboriginals of the Firm for yourself, if you feel so inclined. They appear to have been Phoenicians. Tyre, maybe, but I gather non-Semitic. Some remote B.C. glasswork in the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum bears their “mark” – two inverted V’s with a kind of P between. There are others – a cone “supported by” two doves; a running hound, a crescent moon, and a hand – just a slim, ungrasping hand. Such marks have been discovered, they say, woven into mummy linen, into Syrian embroidery, Damascus silks, and tapestry from the Persian Gulf.

  ‘The priestesses of Astaroth, according to Bateson, danced in gauze of L. L. & V.’s handiwork. They exploited the true bombyx ages before Ptolemy; their gold thread gleamed on the Ark of the Covenant; and it was fabric of their weaving in which the Queen of Sheba marvelled before Solomon. The shoes of his apes, sewn-in with seed pearls and splinters of amethyst were — But what’s the good of chattering on like this? I’m not,’ groaned Maunders with a muffled yawn, ‘I’m not a perambulating encyclopaedia. Some old pantaloon of a German, long before Bateson, burrowed in true German fashion into the firm’s past. You may go to bed with his book, if you like – this very night. And then, of course, there are one or two of their old ledgers and curios in the local museum. But I’m not an antiquarian. My only point is that the past even of a soapboiler is none the worse for being the distant past. What’s more, they knew in those days that objects are only of value when representative of subjects. Has it never occurred to you (no, I suppose not) that the Wisest’s apes, ivory, and peacocks were symbolical? The apes representing, of course —’

  ‘Of course,’ I interruped hurriedly. ‘But what I’m after, Maunders, is something faintly resembling matter-of-fact. These Lispet people – what is really their history? Subsequent, I mean, to the Apocrypha on which you have already drawn. Honestly, that pathetic old guy with the pouch of bast at the corner rather interested me.’