Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  1 First published in London Mercury, October 1922.

  Out of the Deep

  The steely light of daybreak, increasing in volume and intensity as the east grew larger with the day, showed clearly at length that the prodigious yet elegant Arabian bed was empty. What might tenderly have cradled the slumbers of some exquisite Fair of romance now contained no human occupant at all. The whole immense room – its air dry and thin as if burnt – was quiet as a sepulchre.

  To the right of the bed towered a vast and heavily carved wardrobe. To the left, a lofty fireplace of stone flanked by its grinning frigid dogs. A few cumbrous and obscure oil paintings hung on the walls. And, like the draperies of a proscenium, the fringed and valanced damask curtains on either side the two high windows, poured down their motionless cataract of crimson.

  They had been left undrawn over night, and yet gave the scene a slight theatricality, a theatricality which the painted nymphs disporting themselves on the ceiling scarcely helped to dispel.

  Not that these coy and ogling faces suggested any vestige of chagrin at the absence of the young man who for some weeks past had shared the long nights with them. They merely smiled on. For, after all, Jimmie’s restless head upon the pillow had never really been in harmony with his pompous inanimate surroundings – the thin high nose, like the beak of a small ship, between the fast-sealed lids and narrow cheekbones, the narrow bird-like brow, the shell of the ear slightly pointed. If, inspired by the distant music of the spheres, the painted creatures had with this daybreak broken into song, it would certainly not have been to the tune of ‘Oh Where, and Oh Where is My Little Dog Gone?’ There was even less likelihood of Jimmie’s voice now taking up their strains from out of the distance.

  And yet, to judge from appearances, the tongue within that head might have been that of an extremely vivacious talker – even though, apart from Mrs Thripps, its talk these last few days had been for the most part with himself.

  Indeed, as one of his friends had remarked: ‘Don’t you believe it. Jimmie has pots and pots to say, though he don’t say it. That’s what makes him such a dam good loser.’ Whether or not; if Jimmie had been in the habit of conversing with himself, he must have had odd company at times.

  Night after night he had lain there, flat on his back, his hands crossed on his breast – a pose that never failed to amuse him. A smooth eminence in the dark, rich quilt about sixty inches from his chin indicated to his attentive eye the points of his toes. The hours had been heavy, the hours had been long – still there are only twelve or so of utter darkness in the most tedious of nights, and matins tinkles at length. Excepting the last of them – a night, which was now apparently for ever over – he had occupied this majestic bed for about six weeks, though on no single occasion could he have confessed to being really at home in it.

  He had chosen it, not from any characteristic whim or caprice, and certainly not because it dominated the room in which his Uncle Timothy himself used to sleep, yes, and for forty years on end, only at last to expire in it. He had chosen it because, when its Venetian blinds were pulled high up under the fringed cornice, it was as light as a London April sky could make it; and because – well, just one single glance in from the high narrow doorway upstairs had convinced him that the attic in which he was wont to sleep as a small boy was simply out of the question. A black heavy flood of rage swept over him at sight of it – he had never before positively realized the abominations of that early past. To a waif and stray any kind of shelter is, of course, a godsend, but even though this huge sumptuous barrack of a house had been left to him (or, rather, abandoned to him) by his Uncle Timothy’s relict, Aunt Charlotte, Jimmie could not – even at his loosest – have been described as homeless.

  Friendless rather – but that of his own deliberate choice. Not so very long ago, in fact, he had made a clean sweep of every single living being, male or female, to whom the term friend could, with some little elasticity, be applied. A little official affair, to put it politely, eased their exit. And then, this vacant hostel. The house, in fact (occupied only by a caretaker in the service of his aunt’s lawyers) had been his for the asking at any time during the last two or three years. But he had steadily delayed taking possession of it until there was practically no alternative.

  Circumstances accustom even a young man to a good many inconveniences. Still it would have been a little too quixotic to sleep in the street, even though his Uncle Timothy’s house, as mere ‘property’, was little better than a white and unpleasing elephant. He could not sell it, that is, not en masse. It was more than dubious if he was legally entitled to make away with its contents.

  But, quite apart from an extreme aversion to your Uncle Timothy’s valuables in themselves, you cannot eat, even if you can subsist on, articles of virtu. Sir Richard Grenville – a hero for whom Jimmie had every respect – may have been accustomed to chewing up his wine-glass after swigging off its contents. But this must have been on the spur of an impulse, hardly in obedience to the instinct of self-preservation. Jimmie would have much preferred to balance a chair at the foot of his Uncle’s Arabian bed and salute the smiling lips of the painted nymphs on the ceiling. Though even that experiment would probably have a rather gritty flavour. Still, possession is nine points of the law, and necessity is the deadly enemy of convention. Jimmie was unconscious of the faintest scruples on that score.

  His scruples, indeed, were in another direction. Only a few days ago – the day, in fact, before his first indulgence in the queer experience of pulling the bell – he had sallied out with his Aunt Charlotte’s black leather dressing bag positively bulging with a pair of Bow candlesticks, an illuminated missal, mutely exquisite, with its blues and golds and crimsons, and a tiny old silver-gilt bijouterie box. He was a young man of absurdly impulsive aversions, and the dealer to whom he carried this further consignment of loot was one of them.

  After a rapid and contemptuous examination, this gentleman spread out his palms, shrugged his shoulders, and suggested a sum that would have caused even a more phlegmatic connoisseur than his customer’s Uncle Timothy to turn in his grave.

  And Jimmie replied, nicely slurring his r’s, ‘Really Mr So-and-so, it is impossible. No doubt the things have an artificial value, but not for me. I must ask you to oblige me by giving me only half the sum you have kindly mentioned. Rather than accept your figure, you know, I would – well, perhaps it would be impolite to tell you what I would prefer to do. Dies irae, dies illa, and so on.’

  The dealer flushed, though he had been apparently content to leave it at that. He was not the man to be easily insulted by a good customer. And Jimmie’s depredations were methodical. With the fastidiousness of an expert he selected from the rare and costly contents of the house only what was light and portable and became inconspicuous by its absence. The supply he realized, though without any perceptible animation, however recklessly it might be squandered, would easily last out his lifetime.

  Certainly not. After having once made up his mind to accept his Uncle Timothy’s posthumous hospitality, the real difficulty was unlikely to be a conscientious one. It was the attempt merely to accustom himself to the house – the hated house – that grew more and more arduous. It falsified his hope that, like other experiences, this one would prove only the more piquant for being so precarious. Days and moments quickly flying – just his one funny old charwoman, Mrs Thripps, himself, and the Past.

  After pausing awhile under the dingy and dusty portico, Jimmie had entered into his inheritance on the last afternoon in March. The wind was fallen; the day was beginning to narrow; a chill crystal light hung over the unshuttered staircase. By sheer force of a forgotten habit he at once ascended to the attic in which he had slept as a child.

  Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture – the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls – as of a perfect hive
of abhorrent memories.

  That high cupboard in the corner from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate – trumpet of every wind that blows – these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.

  Quite apart from themselves, they reminded him of incidents and experiences which at the time could scarcely have been so nauseous as they now seemed in retrospect. He found himself suffocatingly resentful even of what must have been kindly intentions. He remembered how his Aunt Charlotte used to read to him – with her puffy cheeks, plump ringed hands, and the moving orbs of her eyes showing under her spectacles.

  He wasn’t exactly accusing the past. Even in his first breeches he was never what could be called a nice little boy. He had never ordered himself lowly and reverently to any of his betters – at least in their absence. Nevertheless, what stirred in his bosom as he gazed in on this discarded scene was certainly not remorse.

  He remembered how gingerly and with what peculiar breathings, his Uncle Timothy used to lift his microscope out of its wooden case; and how, after the necessary manipulation of the instrument, he himself would be bidden mount a footstool and fix his dazzled eye on the slides of sluggish or darting horrors of minute magnified ‘life’. And how, after a steady umaw-ing drawl of inapprehensible instruction, his uncle would suddenly flick out a huge silk pocket handkerchief as a signal that little tongue-tied nervous boys were themselves nothing but miserable sluggish or darting reptiles, and that his nephew was the most deplorable kind of little boy.

  Jimmie remembered, too, once asking the loose bow-shaped old gentleman in his chair if he might himself twist the wheel; and his Uncle Timothy had replied in a loud ringing voice, and almost as if he were addressing a public meeting: ‘Um, ah, my boy, I say No to that!’ He said No to most things, and just like that, if he vouchsafed speech at all.

  And then there was Church on Sundays; and his hoop on weekdays in the Crescent; and days when, with nothing to do, little Jimmie had been wont to sit watching the cold silvery rain on the window, the body he was in slowly congealing the while into a species of rancid suet pudding. Mornings too, when his Aunt Charlotte would talk nasally to him about Christianity; or when he was allowed to help his uncle and a tall, scared parlourmaid dust and re-arrange the contents of a cabinet or bureau. The smell of the air, the check duster, the odious objets d’art and the ageing old man snorting and looking like a superannuated Silenus beside the neat and frightened parlourmaid – it was a curious thing; though Death with his louring grin had beckoned him off: there he was – alive as ever.

  And when amid these ruminations, Jimmie’s eyes had at last fixed themselves on the frayed, dangling cord that hung from the ceiling over the trucklebed, it was because he had already explored all that the name Soames had stood for. Soames the butler – a black-clothed, tub-bellied, pompous man that might have been his Uncle Timothy’s impoverished first cousin or illegitimate step-brother: Soames: Soames.

  Soames used frequently to wring Jimmie’s then protuberant ears. Soames sneaked habitually; and with a sort of gloating piety on his drooping face, was invariably present at the subsequent castigation. Soames had been wont to pile up his plate with lumps of fat that even Destiny had never intended should consort with any single leg of mutton or even sirloin of beef – jelly-like, rapidly cooling nuggets of fat. And Soames invariably brought him cold rice pudding when there was hot ginger roll.

  Jimmie remembered the lines that drooped down from his pale long nose. The sleek set of his whiskers as he stood there in his coat-tails reflected in the glass of the sideboard, carving the Sunday joint.

  But that slack green bell-cord! – his very first glimpse of it had set waggling scores of peculiar remembrances. First, and not so very peculiarly, perhaps, it recalled an occasion when, as he stood before his Aunt’s footstool to bid her Good-night, her aggrieved pupils had visibly swum down from beneath their lids out of a nap, to fix themselves and look at him at last as if neither he nor she, either in this or in any other world, had ever so much as seen one another before. Perhaps his own face, if not so puffy, appeared that evening to be unusually pasty and pallid – with those dark rings which even to this day added vivacity and lustre to his extremely clear eyes. And his Aunt Charlotte had asked him why he was such a cowardly boy and so wickedly frightened of the dark.

  ‘You know very well your dear Uncle will not permit gas in the attic, so there’s no use asking for it. You have nothing on your conscience, I trust? You have not been talking to the servants?’

  Infallible liar, he had shaken his head. And his Aunt Charlotte in return wagged hers at him.

  ‘It’s no good staring in that rebellious, sullen way at me. I have told you repeatedly that if you are really in need of anything, just ring the bell for Soames. A good little boy with nothing on his conscience knows that God watches over him. I hope you are at least trying to be a good little boy. There is a limit even to your Uncle’s forbearance.’

  It was perfectly true. Even bad little boys might be ‘watched over’ in the dead of night, and as for his Uncle Timothy’s forbearance, he had discovered the limitations of that fairly early in life.

  Well, it was a pity, he smiled to himself, that his Aunt Charlotte could not be present to see his Uncle Timothy’s bedroom on that first celebration of their prodigal nephew’s return. Jimmie’s first foray had been to range the house from attic to cellar (where he had paused to rest) for candlesticks. And that night something like six dozen of the ‘best wax’ watched over his heavy and galvanic slumbers in the Arabian bed. Aunt Charlotte, now rather more accustomed to the dark even than Jimmie himself, would have opened her eyes at that.

  Gamblers are naturally superstitious folk, he supposed; but that was the queerest feature of the whole thing. He had not then been conscious of even the slightest apprehension or speculation. It was far rather a kind of ribaldry than any sort of foreboding that had lit up positive constellations of candles as if for a Prince’s – as if for a princely Cardinal’s – lying-in-state.

  It had taken a devil of a time too. His Uncle Timothy’s port was not the less potent for a long spell of obscure mellowing, and the hand that held the taper had been a shaky one. Yet it had proved an amusing process too. Almost childish. Jimmie hadn’t laughed like that for years. Certainly until then he had been unconscious of the feeblest squeamish inkling of anything – apart from old remembrances – peculiar in the house. And yet – well, no doubt even the first absurd impulsive experiment that followed had shaken him up.

  Its result would have been less unexpected if he hadn’t made a point and almost a duty of continually patrolling the horrible old vacant London mansion. Hardly a day had lately passed – and there was nothing better to do – but it found him on his rounds. He was not waiting for anything (except for the hour, maybe, when he would have to wait no more). Nevertheless, faithful as the sentinel on Elsinore’s hoary ramparts, he would find himself day after day treading almost catlike on from room to room, surveying his paradoxical inheritance, jotting down a list in a nice order of the next ‘sacrifices’, grimacing at the Ming divinities, and pirouetting an occasional long nose at the portraits on the walls.

  He had sometimes had a few words – animated ones, too – with Mrs Thripps, and perhaps if he could have persuaded himself to talk ‘sensibly,’ and not to gesticulate, not to laugh himself so easily into a fit of coughing, she would have proved better company. She was amazingly honest and punctual and quiet; and why to heaven a woman with such excellent qualities should customarily wear so scared a gleam in her still, colourless eyes, and be so idiotically timid and nervous in his company, he could not imagine.

  She was being paid handsome wages anyhow; and, naturally, he was aware of no rooted objection to other people helping themselves; at least if they managed it as skilfully as he
did himself. But Mrs Thripps, it seemed, had never been able in any sense at all to help herself. She was simply a crape-bonneted ‘motherly’ creature, if not excessively intelligent, if a little slow in seeing ‘points’. It was, indeed, her alarm when he asked her if she had happened to notice any young man about the house that had irritated him – though, of course, it was hardly fair not to explain what had given rise to the question. That was perfectly simple. It was like this —

  For years – for centuries, in fact – Jimmie had been, except in certain unusual circumstances, an exceedingly bad sleeper. He still hated sleeping in the dark. But a multitude of candles at various degrees of exhaustion make rather lively company when you are sick of your Uncle Timothy’s cellar. And even the best of vintage wines may prove an ineffectual soporific. His, too, was a wretchedly active mind.

  Even as a boy he had thought a good deal about his uncle and aunt, and Soames, and the house, and the Rev Mr Grayson, and spectres, and schoolmasters, and painted nymphs, and running away to sea, and curios, and dead silence, and his early childhood. And though, since then, other enigmas had engaged his attention, this purely automatic and tiresome activity of mind still persisted.

  On his oath he had been in some respects and in secret rather a goody-goody little boy; though his piety had been rather the off-spring of fear than of love. Had he not been expelled from Mellish’s almost solely for that reason? What on earth was the good of repeatedly thrashing a boy when you positively knew that he had lied merely from terror of your roaring voice and horrible white face?

  But there it was; if there had been someone to talk to, he would not have talked so much to himself. He would not have lain awake thinking, night after night, like a rat in a trap. Thinking was like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it is almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!