Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  ‘Bang goes fourpence,’ I remarked a little sheepishly. ‘Still, mine was about the right average, I suppose.’

  The man in the leather leggings – as if the problem were not for his solution – at once turned his little eyes towards our companion in the corner, whose face was still wreathed with the friendliest of grimaces at my efforts.

  ‘Well, now,’ he took me up, ‘I’m not so sure. In my view, that minx there sidles out too often. Most young men and more old ones would be content with once in six. I would myself. It’s our credulity. We live on hopes, however long they may be deferred. We live, as you might say; but how many of us learn? How many of us want to make sure?’ He paused for an answer: his small eyes fixed in his face. ‘Not one in a million,’ he decided.

  I stole another look into the narrow darkness of the Young Lady’s Bower.

  ‘Oh,’ he interrupted, ‘I wasn’t thinking merely of the “eternal feminine”, as they call it. That’s only one of the problems; though even an answer to that might be interesting. There’s Free Will, for example; there’s Moral Responsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come from and where we are going to. Why, we don’t even know what we are – in ourselves, I mean. And how many of us have tried to find out?’

  The man in leggings withdrew his stare and groped out a hand towards his pint-pot. ‘Have you?’ he enquired.

  The dark-eyed, wizened face lit up once more with its curiously engaging smile. ‘Well, you see, I was once a schoolmaster, and from an official point of view, I suppose, it is part of the job. To find answers, I mean. But, as you’ll agree, we temporize; we compromise. On the other hand, I once met quite by chance, as we call it, a man who had spent I should guess a good many years on that last problem. All by himself, too. You might almost describe it as a kind of pilgrimage – though I’m not anxious to repeat it. It was my turn for a lesson.’

  ‘And what was his solution?’ I enquired.

  ‘Have you ever been to Porlock – the Weir?’ the little man enquired.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I mention Porlock,’ he went on, ‘because if you had ever been there, the place I’m thinking of might perhaps call it to mind. Though mine was on a different scale – a decidedly different scale. I doubt, for example, if it will ever become one of those genial spots frequented by week-end tourists and chars-a-banc. In the days I’m speaking of – twenty years or more ago – there wasn’t even the rudiments of an inn in the place. Only a beershop about half the size of this tap-room, with a population to match – just a huddle of fishermen’s cottages tucked in under the cliff.

  ‘I was walking at the time, covering unfamiliar ground, and had managed to misread my map. My aim had been to strike into a cliff-path that runs more or less parallel with the coast; but I had taken the wrong turn at the cross-roads. Once astray, it seemed better manners to keep on. How can you tell what chance may have secreted in her sleeve, even when you don’t put pennies in slots?

  ‘I persuaded an old lady to give me tea at one of the cottages, and asked my way. Visitors were rare events, it seemed. At first she advised me to turn back; I couldn’t do better than that. But after further questioning, she told me at last of a lower cliff track or path, some miles apparently this side of the one I had in view. She marked it out for me with her rheumaticky old forefinger on the table-cloth. Follow this path far enough, I gathered, it would lead me into my right road at last.

  ‘Not that she suggested my making the attempt. By no means. It was a matter of seven miles or more. And neither the natives of the village nor even chance visitors, it seemed, were tempted to make much use of this particular route.’

  ‘Why not?’ enquired the man in leggings, and immediately coughed, as if he had thought better of it.

  ‘That’s what I am coming to,’ replied the schoolmaster – as though he had been lying in wait for the question. ‘You see my old lady had volunteered her last piece of information with a queerish look in her eyes – like some shy animal slipping into cover. She was telling me the truth, but not, I fancied, the whole truth.

  ‘Naturally I asked what was wrong with the path; and was there anything of interest on the way or at the end of it – worth such a journey? Once more she took a long slow look at me, as if my catechism were rather more pressing than the occasion warranted. There was a something marked on the map, she had been given to understand – “just an old, ancient building, like”.

  ‘Sure enough there was: though unfortunately long wear of the one I carried had not only left indecipherable more than an Old English letter or two of any record of it, but had rubbed off a square half-mile or so of the country round about it.

  ‘It was proving a little irksome to draw Truth out of her well, and when innocently enough I asked if there was any one in charge of the place, the old lady was obviously disconcerted. She didn’t seem to think it needed being taken charge of; though she confessed at last that a house “not nearly so old, sir, you will understand”, stood nearby, in which lived a gentleman of the name of Kempe.

  ‘It was easier sailing now that we had come to Mr Kempe. The land, it appeared, including the foreshore – but apart from the chapel – had been in his family since the beginning of time. Mr Kempe himself had formerly been in the church – Conformist or otherwise – and had been something of a traveller, but had returned home with an invalid wife many years before.

  ‘Mrs Kempe was dead now; and there had been no children, “none, at least, as you would say grew up to what might be called living”. And Mr Kempe himself had not only been ailing for some little time, but might, for all my informant knew apparently, be dead himself. Nevertheless, there was still a secretive look in the faded eyes – almost as if she believed Mr Kempe had discovered little methods of his own against the onsets of mortality! Anyhow, she couldn’t tell; nobody ever went that way now, so far as she was aware. There was the new road up above. What’s more, tidings of Mr Kempe’s end, I gathered, however solitary, would not exactly put the village into mourning.

  ‘It was already latish afternoon; and in that windless summer weather walking had been a rather arduous form of amusement. I was tired. A snowy low-pitched upper-room overlooking the sea was at my disposal if I wanted it for a night or two. And yet, even while I was following this good soul up her narrow staircase, I had already decided to push on in the direction of Mr Kempe. If need be, I would come back that evening. Country people are apt to be discreet with strangers – however open in appearance. Those shrewd old eyes – when at least they showed themselves – had hinted that even with an inch to the mile a map-maker cannot exhaust a countryside. The contours, I had noticed, were unusual. Besides, Mr Kempe was not less likely to be interesting company because he was a recluse!

  ‘I put down five shillings on account for my room, and the kindly old creature laid them aside in an ornament on her mantelpiece. There they lie still. for all I know. I have never reclaimed them.’

  The man in leggings once more turned his large, shapeless face towards the schoolmaster, but this time he made no audible comment.

  ‘And did you find Mr Kempe?’ I enquired.

  The schoolmaster smiled, looking more like a philanthropic monkey than ever. ‘I set out at once: watched by the old lady from her porch, until, with a wave of my hand for adieu, I turned out of the village street, and she was hidden from sight. There was no mistaking the path – even though it led off over a stile into a patch of stinging-nettles, and then past a boggy goose-pond.

  ‘After a few hundred yards it began to dip towards the shore, keeping more or less level with the sea for a mile or so until it entered a narrow and sandy cove – the refuge even in summer of all sorts of flotsam and searubbish; and a positive maelstrom, I should imagine, when the winter gales sweep in. Towards the neck of this cove the wheel-marks in the thin turf faded out, and the path meandered on for a while beside a brook and under some fine ash trees, then turned abruptly to the right, and almost due north. The bleac
hed bows of a tarred derelict boat set up on end and full of stones – The Orion – was my last touch with civilization.

  ‘It was a quiet evening; the leaves and grasses shone green and motionless, the flowers standing erect on their stalks under the blue sky, as if carved out of wax. The air was uncommonly sweet, with its tang of the sea. Taking things easy like this, it was well worth while to be alive. I sat down and rested, chewing a grass-stalk and watching the friendly lapping sea. Then up and on.

  ‘After about an hour’s steady walking, the path began once more to ascend. It had by now led shorewards again, though I was softly plodding on out of sight and all but out of sound of the tide. Dense neglected woods rose on either side of me, and though wherever the sun could pierce in there were coverts in plenty, hardly a cry of insect or bird stirred the air. To all intents I might have been exploring virgin country. Now and again indeed the fallen bole of a tree or matted clumps of bramble, briony, and traveller’s joy compelled me to make a widish detour. But I was still steadily ascending, and the view tended at length to become more and more open; with here and there a patch of bright green turf and a few scrub bushes of juniper or sprouting tamarisk.

  ‘Shut in as I had been, until this moment it had been difficult to guess how far above me the actual plateau lay, or precisely how far below, the sea – though I had caught distant glimpses now and again of its spreading silver and the far horizon. Even at this point it would have been flattery to call the track a path. The steeper its incline, the more stony and precarious became one’s footing. And then at last I rounded the first of a series of bluffs or headlands, commanding a spectacular view of the coast behind me, though nothing of what lay in front.

  ‘The tiny village had vanished. About a hundred and fifty feet beneath the steep on whose margin I was standing – with a flaming bush of gorse here and there, and an occasional dwarf oak as grey as silk in the evening light – the incoming tide gently mumbled its rocks, rocks of a peculiar patchy green and black.

  ‘I took another look at my map, enjoyed a prolonged “breather”, and went on. Steadily up and inward now and almost due north-west. And once more untended thickets rose dense on either side, and the air was oppressed with a fragrance sickly as chloroform. Some infernal winter tempest or equinoctial gale must have lately played havoc here. Again and again I had to clamber over the bole or through the head-twigs of monster trees felled by the wind, and still studded with a few sprouting post-mortem pale-green buds. It was like edging between this world and the next.

  ‘Apart, too, from the gulls with their saturnine gabbling, and flights of clanging oyster-catchers on the rocks below, what birds I saw were birds of prey: buzzards and kestrels chiefly, suspended as if by a thread from space, their small heads stooping between their quivering wings. And once I overheard what I took to be the cough of a raven to its mate. About twenty minutes afterwards, my second bluff hove into sight. And I paused for a while, staring at it.

  ‘For ordinary purposes I have a fairly good head. And yet I confess that before venturing further I took a prolonged look at this monster and at the faint patternings of the path that lay before me, curving first in, then out, along and across the face of the cliff, and just faintly etching its precipitous surface as it edged out of sight. It’s a foolish thing perhaps to imagine oneself picked out clean against the sky on a precipitous slope – if, that is, you mean to put the fancy into action. You get a sort of double-barrelled view of your mortal body crouching there semi-erect, little better than a framework of bones.

  ‘Not that there was as yet any positive risk or danger. The adventure would have been child’s play, no doubt, even for an amateur mountaineer. You had only to pick your way, keeping a sharp eye on the loose stones, and – to avoid megrims – skirting round the final curve without pausing to look up or to look down. A modest man might possibly try all fours. Still, after that, it did not surprise me to remember that visitors to these parts had usually preferred some other method of reaching the road and country up above. Pleasure may be a little over-spiced with excitement.’

  ‘Steep, eh?’ ejaculated the man in leggings.

  ‘Yes, steep,’ replied the schoolmaster; ‘though taken as mere scenery,’ he continued, ‘there was nothing to find fault with. Leagues and leagues of sea stretched out to the vague line of the horizon like an immense plate, mottled green and blue. A deep pinkish glow, too, had begun to spread over the eastern skies, mantling up into heights of space made the more abysmal in appearance by wisps of silver cirrus.

  ‘Now and again I lay back with my heels planted on what was left of the path, and rested a moment, staring up into that infinity. Now and again I all but decided to go back. But sheer curiosity to see the mysterious hermitage of which I had heard, and possibly the shame of proving myself yet another discredited visitor, lured me on. Solitude, too, is like deepening water to a swimmer: that also lures you on. Except for an occasional bloated, fork-tailed, shrimp-like insect that showed itself when a flake of dislodged stone went scuttering down into the abyss below, I was the only living creature abroad. Once more I pushed cautiously forward. But it was an evil-looking prospect, and the intense silence of the evening produced at last a peculiar sense of unreality and isolation. My universe seemed to have become a mere picture – and I out of place in it. It was as if I had been mislaid and forgotten.

  ‘I hung by now, I suppose, about two or three hundred feet above the sea; and maybe a hundred or so beneath the summit of the wall which brushed my left elbow. Wind-worn boulders, gently whispered over by saplings of ash or birch, jutted shallowly here and there above and below me. Marine plants lifted their wind-bitten flowers from inch-wide ledges on which their seeds had somehow found a lodging. The colours mirrored in sky and water increased in brilliance and variety as the sunset advanced, though here was only its reflection; and the flat ocean beneath lapped soundlessly on; its cream-like surf fringing here and there the very base of the cliff, beneath which, like antediluvian monsters, vast rocks lay drowsing. I refrained from examining them too closely.

  ‘But even if – minute intrusive mote that I was, creeping across that steep of wall – even if I had been so inclined, there was little opportunity. Though for centuries wind, frost and rain had been gnawing and fretting at the face of the cliff, sure foothold and finger-hold became ever more precarious. An occasional ringing reverberation from far below suggested, too, that even the massive bulk of rock itself might be honeycombed to its foundations. What once had been a path was now the negation of one. And the third prodigious bluff towards which I presently found myself slowly, almost mechanically, advancing, projected into space at a knife-like angle; cut sharp in gigantic silhouette against the skies.

  ‘I made a bewildering attempt to pretend to be casual and cheerful – even to whistle. But my lips were dry, and breath or courage failed me. None the less I had contrived to approach within twenty yards or so of that last appalling precipice, when, as if a warning voice had whispered the news in my ear, I suddenly realized the predicament I was in. To turn back now was impossible. Nor had I a notion of what lay on the further side of the headland. For a few instants my bones and sinews rebelled against me, refusing to commit themselves to the least movement. I could do no more than cling spasmodically with my face to the rock.

  ‘But to hang there on and on and wither like an autumnal fly was out of the question. One single hour of darkness, one spinning puff of wind, would inevitably dislodge me. But darkness was some hours distant; the evening was of a dead calm; and I thanked my stars there was no sun to roast and confuse me with his blaze and heat. I thanked my stars – but where would my carcase be when those stars began to show themselves in the coming night? All this swept through my mind in an instant. Complete self-possession was the one thing needful. I realized that too. And then a frightful cold came over me; sweat began to pour off my body; the very soul within me became sick with fear.

  ‘I use the word soul because this renewed n
ausea was something worse than physical. I was a younger man then, and could still in the long run rely on nerve and muscle, but fear turns one’s blood to water – that terror of the spirit, and not merely of the mind or instinct. It bides its moment until the natural edges off into – into the unknown.

  ‘Not that Nature, as we call her, even in the most congenial surroundings, is the sort of old family nurse that makes one’s bed every morning, and tucks one up with a “God bless you” overnight. Like the ants and the aphides and the elvers and the tadpoles, she produces us humans in millions; leaving us otherwise to our own devices. We can’t even guess what little stratagems for the future she may be hiding up her sleeve. We can’t even guess. But that’s a mere commonplace. After all, so far as we can prove, she deserves only a small “n” to her name.

  ‘What I’m suggesting is merely that though she appeared to have decoyed me into this rat-trap with all her usual artlessness, she remained a passive enemy, and what now swathed me in like a breath of poison – as, with face, palms, knees and belly pressed close against the rock, I began once more working softly on from inch-wide ledge and inch-deep weed, my tongue like tinder, my eyes seeming to magnify every glittering atom they tried to focus – was the consciousness of some power or influence beyond Nature’s. It was not so much of death – and I actually with my own eyes saw my body inertly hurtling to its doom beneath – that I was afraid. What terrified me beyond words to express was some positive presence here in a more desperate condition even than I. I was being waylaid.