Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  Cuspidor, though little else than a mere mortal, had been fairly content with his new office. But he sometimes pined for more company and even for rather more work. Saints only of the First Hierarchy, he had been told, had occasion to traverse in turn each of the Seven Valleys. Of these by far the greater number made no stay in the Seventh, and had no need of his ministrations. And even of the First Hierarchy there were many Orders.

  ‘So, too, of the stars, my son,’ St Dusman had explained. ‘Those which to our groping eyes appear the dimmest, may so appear not because they are of inferior splendour but because they are the more remote.’

  Cuspidor indeed had little need to complain of undue courtesies. Wayfarers who were bound only for the nearer Valleys, to await such biddings as might reach them there, frequently passed on their way with downcast head as if lost in reverie, and without so much as lifting their eyes to glance at the shoe-cleaner and his hostel, or even at the galloping messengers that, like drifts of sunbeams in a forest, swept past them across the turf, bound on errands the goal and purpose of which even the farthest-travelling of the saints themselves seemed content to be ignorant.

  Cuspidor had no clock. But he possessed a little wit, and had set up on end a switch of wood, and had cut out on the turf a circle round it, marked at intervals with a XII, a III, a VI and a IX. And though he had no clear notion of what exact quantity of time consisted his day, he had some clumsy notion of the number of the days themselves, as they glided like flowing water through the weeds of his consciousness.

  Much else, apart from realization of those days, so glided. Even irrevocable dreams may leave behind them in the mind of the dreamer the empty shell of their being; and Cuspidor was as vaguely aware of events and experiences beyond his comprehension as a fish in the shallows of the ocean may be aware of the outskirts of the continents that fringe it in. His duties though menial were light. He kept watch upon the paths from dawn till twilight: and then no more. After nightfall – though in this region only a deep emerald dusk, thinning to a crystalline radiance above the remoter valleys, succeeded the placid glory of the day – after nightfall any belated traveller must knock, and Cuspidor must rise from his bed to bid him welcome, and to prepare the guest room. No visitor made a prolonged stay, and few, any.

  Having come to where the shoe-cleaner stood awaiting him with downcast eyes beside his bench, the pilgrim would rest first one foot, then another, on the wooden block prepared for the purpose. And the young man, having unlatched them, would remove shoes or sandals, scrape off into the hollow beneath whatever foreign matter, dust or mud, still adhered to their under-surface, set them out of the sun, and have them ready when their owner next appeared, bent on his outward journey.

  Some little practice had resulted in what was by now almost conspicuous evidence of Cuspidor’s labours. A few paces behind the hostel, where stood his beehives and grew his grain and fruit, lay a heap of refuse. It was his little private record of the saints’ wayfarings – as well as of his own industry. Even a casual eye might have fastened in amazement on the medley of elements represented there: minute stones of a lustre that must surely have once been precious to some discerning eye; fine-coloured sands unlike any Earth or her sister planets can afford; scraps of what resembled ivory, infinitesimals of an endless variety, objects far past their present owner’s sagacity to give a name to, or even to recognize, lay scattered and buried in this heap.

  While still unaccustomed to his duties and by means of a rough sieve which he had plaited out of fibre from the bark of his fruit trees, Cuspidor had spent his leisure hours in separating the coarser objects in this heap into kinds. The brighter these were in mere light and colour the more they charmed his eye, though of their origin and value he was entirely ignorant. Next, what was rare and strange delighted him. But here, too, he fumbled in ignorance. And he had at last wearied of the pursuit altogether, confining his attention solely to an ivory-coloured dust which, he discovered, if scraped together without any other admixture and kneaded with a little water or spittle, could be converted into a smooth, plastic clay. And this he had taught himself to model rudely into whatever shape chanced to take his fancy. If but a word or a smile were bestowed on his workmanship, it was ample reward. And as he made more progress he was as content with none.

  With a lump of this far-fetched clay on his knee, a pointed twig between his fingers, and his body bent almost double, he now sat this fresh morning, completely engrossed in yet another such attempt. It was proving one, however, of infinitely greater difficulty than any that had preceded it. That very daybreak, as he had first stirred in sleep, there had risen in dream into his imagination a phantasmal face of a beauty beyond any that he remembered to have seen in actuality. And yet how strangely familiar it seemed. It had outlasted the dream that gave it birth, haunting .his mind, and it now hung before his very eyes, gazing intently out of its fairness as if at the same time happy in his company and grieved at the faintness of his recognition.

  Lest it should at any instant vanish as swiftly into the nothing out of which it had appeared, Cuspidor, intent on his clay, had forgotten his shoe-cleaning, the saints, the very place wherein he sat. He kneaded and moulded and graved and smoothed – his tongue showing its tip the while between his lips; a frown between his wide young brows as if his destiny itself, his very peace and being hinged upon his success. So woefully absorbed had he become in this peculiar occupation that it was not the old man’s footstep on the sward, but St Dusman’s voice, as he stood peering over his shoulder, that suddenly brought him back to himself.

  The old saint must for some little while past have been drawing near the shoe-cleaner in full view – as soon indeed as he had emerged out of the abyss on the path by which he usually approached the Rest House. Nor was he the only living creature now in sight. A sudden heat coursed through Cuspidor’s body when, having lifted his eyes at his greeting, he discovered already midway up the Sixth Valley, and proceeding on his journey, the figure of one whose raiment showed by its markings that he was no less sacred a personage than a Saint of the Third Order.

  ‘Your flesh may well creep, my son,’ said the old man gently, ‘but by good fortune he needed nothing of you. We made our greetings as he passed me, and I see that he has returned from regions innocent altogether of the metamorphoses of what we may call the tangible and the superfluous. But be wary. There are saints of his hierarchy who strike as swiftly as a thunderbolt.’

  The shoe-cleaner with trembling hands – due in part to the strain of his work and in part to recognition of the peril he had escaped – gazed after the bent and tottering shape now steadily receding from sight. His mouth was shut now; and the phantasmal face had vanished like clouded moonlight from a pool.

  ‘And what are you after this morning, my son? Tired of your pretty baubles?’

  The voice was kindly as ever, and as ever seemed to evoke from hidden chambers in the shoe-cleaner’s mind the ghosts of memories, rather than memories themselves. He rose to his feet and bowed to the old man; still grasping in his hand the orb of kneaded clay, which had stubbornly refused to become more than a clumsy and distasteful symbol of what had haunted his mind.

  ‘If it please you, Master, a wondrous dream visited me this morning.’

  ‘Then be sure you were sleeping fitfully and in some longing, and you were not alone,’ replied the old man.

  The intent narrow eyes in the clean-cut mobile face beneath his own slid round in survey of the verdurous slopes beneath and above them. For Cuspidor only the phantoms of serenity now had their dwelling here. The Saint of the Third Order had by this time entered the immense bottle-shaped approach to the Sixth Valley. And the continual ventriloquial silver twittering in the skies above his own of a company of small hovering birds that tenanted this tranquil wilderness was the only sound and sight of life. A shadow spread over his features as he groaned rather than sighed.

  ‘Weary already?’ insisted the old man.

  ‘It seemed it w
as a dream,’ was the answer, ‘that would last on into the day. And now it is gone.’

  ‘And you were endeavouring, I see,’ the saint retorted, ‘to fashion it out of mud.’

  ‘It is a marvellously easy clay to the fingers, at any rate,’ said the young man. ‘And if only I had the skill I could prove it.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said St Dusman.

  The young shoe-cleaner thrust out his hand over an up-bent elbow, poising his earthen lump in his right palm. And by some secret device of the light that gently flooded the green meadow which stretched in tranquil amplitude around them, there appeared in his crude model a trace of something a little closer to his hope in its markings than the young man had first detected. After a moment or two the old man pushed his spectacles (whose rims even in this rare air showed symptoms of rust) above his eyes, and scrutinized the lump a second time.

  ‘This then was in the image of your dream?’ he enquired. ‘Why immure in what so soon perishes that which in imagination might remain as fresh as its original?’

  The shoe-cleaner frowned and flung his lump of clay to the ground. ‘Why, Master, there is more than one way even of cleaning shoes. It is the best that gives the most pleasure: even though it takes the most pains.’

  The old man’s eyes were of the dimmest blue – far paler than any flower dropped from Dis’s wagon, or even than those which sprinkled their spices like dew in this celestial air. The attention in them now fined itself to a needlepoint, on which, say the sages, thousands upon thousands and many thousands of angels may find an easy footing.

  ‘You have happiness in your work then, Mr shoe-cleaner?’ he enquired pleasantly.

  A queer crisscross expression mapped its way into the young man’s face. The keenness as of a bird, the guile as of a serpent, the alert fixedness as of some long-experienced adept of a craft showed in it; and all of them in the service, so to speak, of an almost childlike smile. ‘What amuses me,’ he said, ‘is that a wayfarer that came yesterday, after watching me awhile stooping over my work here – bending his look on me, as you will understand, just round the rim of his sandal – gave me this.’

  He held up for St Dusman’s inspection a slender stem of ivory expanding into a narrow spoon-like groove. ‘He must have noticed my miserable “lumps of mud,” ‘he explained. ‘And there was nothing on his feet but a scraping of gold-dust.’

  ‘I know him,’ said St Dusman. ‘It was St Antioch. Can you describe your dream in words, my son?’

  The narrow eyelids fell, the hands fumbled. ‘If I could see it in actuality in the air before me,’ muttered a low voice, ‘I should be happy for ever.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ nodded the old man solemnly. ‘Once again, and yet again … You are choosing, I fear, a very long circuit before you will have the opportunity of sharing the experience of standing, as did St Antioch yesterday, amused at the shoe-cleaner with a pretty knack in his craft. Nevertheless, time is made of eternity, and happiness, my son, is but of a moment; and that moment lost in an oblivion of loving kindness.’

  PRINCE AHMAT NAIGUL

  The gloom of night lay over the dense forests that spread themselves like a pall over the face of the earth on either side of the high road – that immeasurable causeway from north of the Great River for countless leagues to the sea. The skies above their motionless crests were fiery with stars. Immediately in front of the horsemen indeed, who were now rapidly approaching along the dim white benighted track on their many-days’ journey from the northern mountains to the Winter Palace that reared its walls and cupolas upon the precipitous banks of the river, stood (rivalling each the other) above the distant fret of trees, and but a few degrees apart, silver Venus and the flaming Dog-Star.

  The horsemen – the scarlet of their head-dresses and their cloaks scarcely discernible in this dense dusk – rode so far in advance of the cavalcade which was following after them that the dust they raised in passing had already floated to rest again before its leaders came into sight.

  Under a milk-cupped, leaf-tressed, umbrella-like tree at the edge of the curved dip which the gigantic highway made at this point in its course, owing to the waters of a brackish lake which stretched itself out like a silver dragon in the uttermost glooms of the forest, sat a leper. Forbidden by law to show his shape in village or city, keeping his slender hold on life as best he could, he was a wanderer and a vagrant, dependent on the charity of chance wayfarers. Yet his marred face, glimmering faintly beneath this black canopy of boughs as if with a phosphorescence of its own, was in spite of its hideousness benign with magnanimity and peace. His empty dish – formed out of the shell of an immense nut whose kind hung in huge clusters, like slumbering groups of monkeys, amid one of the forest trees nearby – lay empty beside him. He had composed his emaciated limbs in an attitude of contemplation. But his bleared eyes were now fixed on the torches and lanthorns of the approaching cavalcade, as its horsemen and broad-wheeled coaches came sweeping towards his screened retreat along the road.

  The skies were still and windless, sharing as it seemed awhile the quiet of boundless space. Even above the swelling tumult raised by the travellers in their journey, the leper marked the melancholy chantings of the nightbirds in the branches above his head and in the thickets around him. Scared by scent and rumour of these human invaders as they approached, the cowering beasts of the forest had long since retired into their further fastnesses, though the bolder of them paused to gaze stealthily out at the leashed hounds, the hooded hawks, the intent or sleeping faces of the convoy, and its living lovely treasure as it swept on its way.

  The crackling torch-flames and coloured lanthorns now flung meanwhile a brilliant and moving cloud of luminosity above the causeway; bridle, harness, lance, scabbard, and spur glittered amid the brilliant colourings of the throng.

  It was the Prince Ahmat Naigul, returning with his bride after the feasting and festivities of their marriage-rites. Coach after coach, burdened with the grandees of his court and retinue – some gently slumbering as they reclined on the low, shallow, cushioned seats within, others chattering and making merry, their eyes gleaming restlessly in the light flung into the dim recesses within their small wheeled houses from the torches of the horsemen that flanked each vehicle in turn – lumbered heavily by, grinding the powdered flint of the highway into dust yet finer. It seemed this living stream between these darkened walls would never cease.

  None the less, there came an interval at last in its garish onset. Then yet another squadron followed after, their milk-white cloaks drawn back over the crimson and silver of their silken undervests to the cruppers of long-maned horses of the colour of old ivory, their head-dresses surmounted with bejewelled plumes of stiff-spined feathers. They rode in silence, spear in hand, the personal bodyguard of Prince Ahmat Naigul himself, whose coach, lightly swaying on its heavy springs and fashioned of dark wood, ivory and silver, now drew near, drawn by its eight ink-black Tartary draught-horses, their outlandish outriders muffled to the eyes this summer evening in tippets of sable.

  The leper rose shivering to his feet, and muffling with his hand the deepcut copper bell that swung suspended by a hempen cord about his middle, he advanced to the edge of the highway.

  And within the royal coach, her head at a gentle angle against its swan-white cushions, Ahmat Naigul’s princess lay asleep. About her brow was a green circlet of leaves of the everlasting Ooneetha tree. Her hair hung down on either side her quiet head in braided plaits, dangling upon her slender shoulders and thence upon the smooth inlaid feathers of the hooded cloak that enwrapped her, itself patterned in a linked soft loveliness after the fashion of the same tree. Her face resembled in its quietude and fairness the twilight of an evening in May, and she reclined in profound slumber, the orange doublet and cuirass of the dark Prince beside her shining like still sheaves of flame against her snow.

  His eyes were fixed intently upon the gently moving darkness of the forest that skirted the high road, but ever and again his gaz
e returned to rest upon the dreaming one beside him. And with bare hand holding his jewelled glove, he would, as it were, make to stroke the feathered folds of her cloak, and then, gently drawing it back, refrain, once more resuming his scrutiny of the vast silence that compassed them in.

  At that instant, the gently rocking coach in which he sat lurched slightly on its leathern springs, as if the mettlesome horses that drew it had swerved at some unexpected sight or sound. A challenging voice broke into the hush. The wheels slowly ceased to revolve; then came to rest in the dust. With a sharp turn of his head, the Prince stooped forward in the warm gloom of the carriage, and peered out of the window. Delicate shafts of light from the moon that every moment was riding higher into the vacancy of the sky, struck diagonally across, silvering the motionless wall of trees that bordered this bend of the high road.

  Full in this flooding radiance, shell in hand, his once white rags dingy and blotched, stood the leper, his matted hair falling lank on either side his half-disfeatured face. The glass-clear pupils beneath the half-closed and fretted lids, were steady in their regard, and were fixed not on the Prince, not apparently on any single object within the shadow of the coach, but as if in contemplation far beyond it. Nevertheless, the first clear glimpse of this whited wayside figure seemed to turn Ahmat Naigul’s body to stone. He desisted even from breathing, nor dared to glance behind him into the shadow, lest the eyes that had been so gently slumbering were now wide agape. And yet the terror that had suddenly assailed a heart at least as courageous as that of any beast that prowled the forests around him had sprung solely from instinct. Such dreadful shows of God’s providence as this mendicant were none too rare, even in a country magnanimously governed.