Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Well, Anthony seems to have shed what one mistakes for artificialities. He shed his ringlets, his foppish clothes, his pretences of languor, his dreamy superiority. He shed his tacit acceptance of the firm’s renown, and so discovered his own imagination. Only in the “tip-toppers” do intellect and imagination lie down together, as will the lion and the lamb.

  ‘Then, of course, he seems gradually or suddenly to have shed the L.L. & V. pride and arrogance. He must have begun to think. All these centuries, please remember, the firm had been gradually realizing why, actually why, their stuff was super-excellent in the eyes of humanity. And that – Oh, I don’t know; but to realize that, perhaps, is to discount its merits elsewhere. Anthony, on the other hand, had come to realize, in his own queer vague fashion, that one’s only salvation is to set such eyes squinting. And yet, not of set and deliberate purpose. He was not a wit. Art, my dear, dear K —, whatever you may like to say, is useless; unless one has the gumption to dissociate use from materialism.’

  ‘I was not aware,’ said I, ‘that I had said anything. You mean, I suppose, that a man has only to realize that his work is excellent for it to begin to lose its virtue. Like beauty, Maunders, and the rouge-pot and powder-puff? Still, I prefer Anthony to trade ethics. What did the rest of them do?’

  ‘What I was about to tell you,’ replied Maunders mildly, ‘is that Anthony had bats in his belfry. Not the vampire variety; just extra-terrestrial bats. He was “queer”. Perhaps more in him that in most of us had come from elsewhere. And the older he grew the more the hook-winged creatures multiplied. No doubt the Firm would have edged him out if it had been practicable. No doubt the young hedge-sparrows would edge out the squab-cuckoo, if that were manageable. But it was not. Anthony was double-dyed, a Lispett with two t’s, and it would have been lèse majesté, domestic high-treason, to acknowledge to the world at large that he was even eccentric.

  ‘Well, there he was, a smallish man, with short-growing hair, a little like Thothmes II, to judge from his portrait – a man of extraordinary gifts in his craft, of an exquisite sensibility to quality and design, but seldom, I imagine, at the Board Meetings. Often, it seems, he used to ramble off into the country. He appears to have especially hated a sort of Frenchiness that had crept into the firms’ wares. But much worse than mooning about to soak in Englishness again, he would ramble off into the country of his mind, and there you need to have a faint notion of where you are before you can safely go any further. It’s difficult, of course, to know exactly what his broodings were. But the story goes that he would complete his nocturnal pilgrimages by climbing up before daybreak into one of the fruit-trees on the hill, a magnificent mulberry – to see the sun, I suppose; to “look down” as far as possible on the Works; to be up among the morning birds, like the old man in the limerick.’

  ‘An odd bat, that,’ I interposed.

  ‘There he would squat,’ continued Maunders imperturbably, ‘poor old creature, peering out of the leaves, the rose of dawn on his face, as when it lightened Blake’s. And presently, the angels up from the valley would pass by, singing and laughing, to their work. A pretty sight it must have been, with their young faces and pure colours and nimble practised gestures. For, mind you, it was still a happiness to be one of the hands in the firm – as compared, at any rate, with being a grimy paw elsewhere. Only at long last would they become aware of the glowing gloom in the heads. Not merely were the brains of the firm tending in one direction and the members remaining more or less static in another, but things outside were beginning to change. The god of machinery was soon to spout smoke and steam from his dismal nostrils, and man to learn the bright little lesson that not only necessities, but even luxuries, can be the cheaper if they are manufactured a gross at a time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘there he would squat; and then?’

  ‘Then,’ breathed Maunders, ‘one morning, one shafted scarlet morning, it seems he saw – well, I cannot say what exactly he did see. No hand anyhow, but a light-embodied dream. A being lovelier than any goddess for whom even an L.L. & V. in the service of the Sorceress of Sidon could have been moved from bowels of superstitious horror to design sandals. A shape, a fleetingness, a visitant – poor old Bat-in-the-Belfry – evoked by a moment’s aspiration and delight out of his own sublime wool-gatherings. And so this ageing creature, this extra-Lispetted old day-dreamer, fell in love – with a non-entity.’

  ‘My dear Maunders; pause,’ I said. ‘In mere self-respect! How could such an occurrence as that have been recorded in the Firm’s annals? No; no.’

  ‘Weren’t there letters?’ sighed Maunders, turning suddenly on me, malacca cane in air. ‘Wasn’t there a crack-brained diary? Haven’t you a vestige of old-fashioned and discredited gumption? Wait till I have finished, and let your sweet-smelling facts have a show. Ask Henrietta. I say,’ he repeated stubbornly, ‘that between the dawn and the daytime, down out of his broad foliage, the hill-side in indescribable bloom, this old meandering Query, this half-demented old Jack-o’-Dreams saw a Vision, and his heart went the same way as long since had gone his head. Haven’t I told you he was what the dear old evolutionists, blind to the inexhaustible graces of creation, esteem a sport?

  ‘The Family Tree had blossomed out of season, for the last time, jetting its dwindling virtue into this final, queer, anomalous bloom; rich with nectarous bane. It had returned upon itself. ’Tis the last rose of Summer that sighs of the Spring. “Ah, yes, but did the vision see him?” – you are sneering to yourself.

  ‘And to that I reply: I don’t know. Do they ever? Or is it that only certain long-suffering eyes can afford them the hospitality of becoming visible? Anyhow, I see her. And in a fashion that is not only the bliss but the very deuce of solitude. Ignore its bidding, K —, and we are damned. Oh yes, I know. The inward eye is all very well. I know it. But to share that experience with these outward groping orbs, I’d – well, I’d gladly go bankrupt. Ask Henrietta.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘This happened. The wool-gathering wits flocked back and golden-fleeced him. One might almost say he became equally astute and extravagant. As a matter of fact, of course, only willing and selfless service can bring every human faculty to bear.’ Maunders sighed. ‘He sent a cheque for a thousand guineas or so to a Dutch bulb-farm, and planted the hill-walk with tulips, April-blue scyllas and narcissi poetici. Narcissi poetici! He tapped an earth-bound spring and set up fauns and dryads, amoretti and what not, spouting subterranean water. He built a shrine of alabaster – with an empty niche.

  ‘It appeared to be mere scatter-brained fooling. Still, it was in a sense in the L.L. & V. tradition, and his partners appear to have let him have a free hand. Don’t forget their even then almost illimitable resources. They’d far far rather – even the strict-whiskered Vaine of the period, who in unhappier circumstances might have sat for the typical alderman – they’d infinitely rather he exhibited his peculiarities within their sphere, so to speak, than bring them to mockery before the world at large.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They hadn’t till then perhaps baldly recognized the world at large, except as a hot-bed of prehistoric or sycophantic customers. And they never – not for an instant – even surmised his depredations would prove active from within. None the less, like some secret serpent, spawn of the forgotten fabulous, he was in fact gnawing at the very vitals of the tradition. Let me put it bluntly, in terms which even you, my dear K —, will appreciate. Anthony Lispett had “gone balmy” on his Vision. She – and therefore he – was “beside himself’.

  ‘I do not suggest that he mixed her up with his superannuating old corpus vile; nothing vulgar to talk of, and tragic to think of, in that sort. He merely lived on from that daybreak dream to dream with but one desire in his poor cracked old cranium – to serve her idea. Aren’t we, all of us, myth-makers? Grins not the Lion at the Unicorn? Does not the soapboiler bedizen our streets with Art – and “atmosphere”? Anthony’s myth was from elsewhe
re – neither from his stomach, his pocket, his reputation, his utilitarian morals, nor his brains. That was all. And as he served her, I suppose, he found himself cherubically treading yet more secretly and inwardly her hesperidean meads.’

  I glanced at Maunders in some dismay. ‘How?’

  ‘Well,’ said he, ‘it is not easy to divine how exactly Anthony began his malpractices. But clearly, since he was perpetually haunted by this illusion of a divine, unearthly stranger, a sort of Athene haunting his hill, his one desire could not but be to set the Works working for her. He could bide his time. He could be quiet and gradual. Anyhow, we know the event, though we can’t say precisely how it evolved.

  ‘One may assume, I suppose, that he would steal to and fro among the nocturnal looms and presses and vats and dyeing rooms, and, ten times more richly gifted by his insane inspiration than he was even by nature, that he just doctored right and left. He would experiment night after night with the firm’s materials in the raw. Worse, he rationed himself in his tree-gazing; and climbed to his leafy perch only during certain conjunctions of the planets. Mere circumstances seem to have waited on him, as did the sun on Joshua.

  ‘But the Lispet and the Vaine of this time were nothing but hidebound old bachelors – intent only on saving the face of convention. The last Double-T died the day after the site of the shrine was decided on. There was no young blood in the firm. And with an almost diabolical ingenuity Anthony seems to have executed only the orders of such clients as wanted the firm’s very finest and rarest handiwork. Even those, of course, who coveted or could afford only the commoner materials were already beginning to dwindle in numbers.

  ‘The other customers he kept waiting, or insulted with questions, or supplied with more delicate and exquisite fabrics than they required.

  ‘The story goes that a certain Empress renowned for her domestic virtues commanded a trousseau for yet another royal niece or what not. A day or two before the young woman’s nuptials, and weeks late, arrived silks and tissues and filigrees spun out of some kind of South American and Borneo spider silk, such as only a nymph could wear. My dear K —, it nearly hatched a European War. That particular Court was little but a menagerie of satyrs.

  ‘Countesses and such-like soliciting “fives” and “fours” in gloves, and “ones” in stockings, might still faintly hope to be accommodated; and even then their coveted wares were a tight fit. For a while the firm seems to have survived on the proceeds from merchandise intended for grown-ups which your cosmopolitan Croesuses snapped up for their children. At secondhand, of course, since few of them could extort a “reference” to the firm for love or even for money.

  ‘Henrietta has a few bits of embroideries and silk of the time. Perhaps she will show them to you. Even a human craft can reflect a divine disaster. And the linens! – of a quality that would derange the ghost of an Egyptian embalmer.

  ‘Even worse, Anthony seems to have indulged an extraordinary sense of propriety. He would lavish L.L. & V. urbanities on some sylph of an actress who had no more morals in the usual acceptation of the term than a humming bird, and flatly returned fabulous cheques (with the order) to old protégés of the firm merely convicted of fortune-making, or of organized “philanthropy”, or of “bettering the conditions” of their fellow-creatures. He seems to have hated the virtuous for their own sake alone.

  ‘In short, he grew madder and madder, and the custom, the good-will, even the reputation of the firm melted like butter in the sun. The last Lispet followed the last Double-T – expired of apoplexy in the counting-house, and was sat on by the coroner. The reigning Vaine turned religious and was buried in a sarcophagus of Portland stone under the foundations of the Unitarian Chapel which he himself had laid in the hope perhaps to lay the L.L. & V. devil at the same time.

  ‘The hands dwindled, died out, dropped away, or even emigrated to the paws. Only a few with some little competence and an impulsive fund of gratitude and courtesy worked on for a master of whom because they loved him, they asked the paltriest wages. The Fruit Walk mutinied into a thicket; the fountains choked themselves with sighing and greened with moss; the tulips found a quieter Nirvana in mere leaf. And Anthony made at last no pretence even of patronizing the final perishing flower of the firm’s old clientele.

  ‘He trafficked in a kind of ludicrous dolls’ merchandize – utterly beautiful little infinitesimals in fabrics worth a hundred times their weight in rubies. So ridiculous a scandal had the “business” at last become that when its few scoffing creditors for old sake’s sake sold it up, not a single bid was made for the property. It is in ruins now. Consult Ezekiel. Or Henrietta.

  ‘I have no wish to sentimentalize; I am not a cynic or a philosopher. Yet I slide my eyes back to that narrow hilled-in strip of sea-coast whence once rose walled Tyre and Sidon, Arvard and Jebail, and – well, I merely remind myself that the Rosetta Stone is but a hornbook of the day before yesterday’s children of men. Things do as a matter of fact seem to rot of their own virtue – inverted, so to speak. It’s not likely to occur again. I mean, not for some time. The Town was almost apologetic. Democracy rarely runs to extremes – unless one may so describe the guillotine. But I am no politician. Enough of that. Even transatlantic visitors are now rare.’

  Maunders and I were standing together by this time under the laurels and bay-trees, not of his own planting, beside his garden railings; he with his bulging, pale-blue eyes – and his sham candlestick branching out of his pocket; and I – well, irritated beyond endurance.

  ‘Good heavens, Maunders; I exclaimed, ‘the stuff you talk! But one would not mind that so much if you could spin a decent yarn. You haven’t even told me what became of the Belfry. Was he nothing but bats at last?’

  ‘Old Anthony?’ he murmured softly. ‘Why, there is nothing in that. He lived on – for years – in the Works. You could see his burning candle from the valley, even on nights of full moon. And, of course, some gay imbecile set the story about that the whole lovely abandoned, derelict place was haunted. Twangling strings and vanishing faces, and a musing shape at a remoter window, her eyes reflecting a scene which only an imagination absolutely denuded of commonsense could hope or desire to share with her. After all, one does ignore the ghost until it is well out of the body. Ask Henrietta.’

  ‘But, Maunders,’ I called after him.

  Too late: his shapeless slouching slate-grey body with its indescribable hat and malacca cane had vanished among the “evergreens”, and the only answer I received was the dwindling rumour of my own expostulatory voice among their leaves – ‘Maunders …’

  Strange to say, it was in this moment of helplessness that I discovered that my little bast basket was gone. When? How? For an instant I hesitated – in pure cowardice. It was a quarter past one, and Mrs Maunders, a charming and active hostess, if a little of a martinet, disapproved of unpunctual guests. But only for an instant. The thought of Bettie’s fair, glad little face decided me; and I set out to retrace my footsteps in search of the lost plaything. Alas, in vain.

  1 First published in Yale Review, January 1923.

  The Tree1

  Encased in his dingy first-class railway carriage, the prosperous Fruit Merchant sat alone. From the collar of his thick frieze greatcoat stuck out a triangular nose. On either side of it a small, bleak, black eye gazed absently at one of the buttons on the empty blue-upholstered seat opposite to him. His breath spread a fading vapour in the air. He sat bolt upright, congealed in body, heated in mind, his unseeing eye fixed on that cloth button, that stud.

  There was nothing else to look at, for his six narrow glass windows were whitely sheeted with hoar-frost. Only his thoughts were his company, while the coach, the superannuated coach, bumped dully on over the metals. And his thoughts were neither a satisfaction nor a pleasure. His square hard head under his square hard hat was nothing but a pot seething with vexation, scorn, and discontent.

  What had invited him out so far, in weather so dismal, on a line so feebly
patronized? Anger all but sparkled in his mind as he considered the intention of his journey, and what was likely to be the end and outcome of it. Twelve solid yet fleeting years divided him from his last encounter with his half-brother – twelve cent per cent years – shipload on shipload of exotic oranges and lemons, pineapples, figs, and blushing pomegranates. At this very moment three more or less seaworthy ocean tramps were steaming across the watery channels of the world laden with cargoes of which he was the principal consignee. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet. He was a substantial man. There was nothing fantastic about him.

  To put on airs when you couldn’t afford them; to meet a friendly offer with rank ingratitude; to quarrel with the only relative on earth who had kept you out of the workhouse – he had sworn never to set foot in the place again. Yet – here he was: and nothing but a fool for his pains. Having washed his hands of the whole silly business, he should have kept them washed. Instead of which he thrust them deeper into his capacious pockets and wondered to heaven when his journey was to come to an end.

  No, it was with no charitable, no friendly, no sentimental motive that he was being glided joltingly on. A half-brother – and particularly if he owes you a hundred pounds and more – need not be even fractionally a being one smiles to think of for the sake of auld lang syne. There was nothing in common between the two of them except a father now twenty-five years in his grave and a loan that would never be repaid.

  That was one galling feature of the situation. There was another. In plain print and in his own respectable morning newspaper the Fruit Merchant had chanced but a week or two ago on the preposterous fact that a mere woodcut of a mere ‘Bird and Flower,’ initialled P.P., had fetched at Christie’s ninety-seven guineas. Ninety-seven guineas; sixty-eight crates of excellent Denia oranges at thirty shillings a crate. What the devil! His small eyes seemed to congest and yet at the same time to protrude from their sockets.