Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  The sun was pouring its light in abundance out of the west on the whitewashed walls and stones and living creatures in the yard; midges in the air, wagtails, chaffinches in the golden straw, a wren scolding, a cart-horse in reverie at the gate, and the deep black-shadowed holes of the byres and stables.

  Still eluding her, Nellie had edged across the yard; and it was then that, lifting her eyes beyond the retreating creature, she had caught sight of that mound, now near at hand, and had realized what it was. She had realized what it was almost as if because her dream had instantly returned with it, almost as if the one thing were the ‘familiar’ of the other. But the horror now was more distant. She could not even (more than vaguely like reflection in water) see those shapes with the shovels simply because what she now saw in actuality was so vivid and lovely a thing. It was a heap of old stable manure; and it must have lain there where it was for a very long time, since it was strayed over in every direction, and was lit up with the tufted colours of at least a dozen varieties of wild flowers. Her glance wandered to and fro from bell to bell and cup to cup; the harsh yet sweet odour of the yard and stables was in her nostrils: that of hay was in the air; and into the distance stretched meadow and field under the sky, their crops sprouting, their green deepening.

  And as she stood, densely gazing at this heap, she herself it had seemed became nothing more than that picture in her eyes. And then Mr Simmonds had come out and across the yard, his flannel shirt-sleeves tucked up above his thick sun-burned arms, and a pitch-fork in his hand. He had touched his hat with that almost schoolboyish little gentle grin of his; then when he noticed that she was trying to speak to him, had stood beside her, leaning on his pitch-fork, his glance following the direction of her eyes.

  For a moment or two she had been unable to utter a syllable for sheer breathlessness, and had turned her face aside a little under its wide-brimmed hat, stammering on, and then almost whispering, as if she were a mere breath of wind and he a dense deep-rooted oak-tree. But he had caught the word ‘flowers’ easily enough.

  There must have been at least a dozen varieties on that foster-mothering heap; complete little families of them: silver, cream, crimson, rose-pink, stars and cups and coronals, and a most marvellous green in their leaves, all standing still together there in the windless ruddying light of the sun. And Mr Simmonds had told her a few of their country names, the very sounds of them like the happy things themselves.

  She had explained how exquisitely fresh they looked – not like street-flowers – though she supposed of course that to him they were mere waste – just ‘wild’ flowers.

  And he had replied, with his courteous ‘ma’ams’ and those curiously bright blue eyes of his in his plain plump face, that it was no wonder they flourished there. And as for being ‘waste’, why, they were kind of enjoying themselves, he supposed, and welcome to it.

  He had been amused, too, in an almost courtly fashion at her disjointed curious questions about the heap. It was just ‘stable-mook’; and the older that is, of course, the better. It would be used all right some time, he assured her. The wild flowers, pretty creatures, wouldn’t harm it; not they. They’d fade by the winter and become it. Some were what they called annuals, he explained, and some perennials. The birds brought the seeds in their droppings, or the wind carried them, or the roots just wandered about of themselves. You couldn’t keep them out of the fields! That was another matter. ‘You see there you had other things to mind. And with that charlock over there! …’

  And still she persisted, struggling as it were in the midst of the dream vaguely hanging its shrouds in her mind, as if towards a crevice of light to come out by. And Mr Simmonds had been patience and courtesy itself. He had told her about the various chemical manures they used on the crops. That was one thing. But there was, she gathered, what was called ‘nature’ in this stuff. It was not exactly the very life of the flowers, for that came you could not tell whence, it is the ‘virtue’ in it. It and the rain and the dew was just as much and as little their life-blood – their sap – as the drink and victuals of humans and animals are. ‘If you starve a lad, ma’am, keep him from his victuals, he don’t exactly flourish, do he?’

  Oh yes, he agreed such facts were strange, and, as you might say almost unknowledgeable. A curious thing, too, that what to some seems just filth and waste and nastiness should be the very secret of all that is most precious in the living things of the world. But then, we don’t all think alike; ‘’t wouldn’t do, d’ye see?’ Why, he had explained and she had listened to him as quietly as a child at school, the roots of a tree will bend at right angles after the secret waters underneath. He crooked his forefinger to show her how. And the groping hair-like filaments of the shallowest weed would turn towards a richer food in the soil. ‘We farmers couldn’t do without it, ma’am.’ If the nature’s out of a thing, it is as good as dead and gone, for ever. Wasn’t it now the ‘good-nature’ in a human being that made him what he was? That and what you might call his very life. ‘Look at Nellie, there! Don’t her just comfort your eye in a manner of speaking?’

  And whether it was Mr Simmonds’s words or the way he said them, as if for her comfort – and they were as much a part and parcel of his own good nature as were his brown hairy arms and his pitch-fork and the creases on his round face – or whether it was just the calm, copious gentle sunshine that was streaming down on them from across the low heavens, and on the roofs and walls of the yard, and on that rich brown-and-golden heap of stable manure with its delicate colonies of live things shedding their beauty on every side, nodding their heads in the lightest of airs; she could not tell. At that very moment and as if for joy a red cock clapped his wings on the midden, and shouted his Qui vive!

  At this, a whelming wave of consolation and understanding seemed to have enveloped her very soul. Mr Simmonds may have actually seen the tears dropping from her eyes as she turned to smile at him, and to thank him. She didn’t mind. It was nothing in the world in her perhaps that he would ever be able to understand. He would never know, never even guess that he had been her predestined redemption.

  For a while they had stood there in silence, like figures in a picture. Nellie had long since wandered off, grazing her way across the meadow. She had now joined the other cows, though she herself was but a heifer, and had not yet calved or given milk. How ‘out of it’ a Londoner was in country places! Her very love of it was a kind of barrier between herself and Mr Simmonds.

  And yet, not an impassable one. Knowing that she was ‘ill’, and being a ‘family man’, and sympathetic, he had understood a little. She had at last hastened away into the house; and shutting her door on herself, had flung herself down at her bedside, remaining there on her knees, with nothing in the nature of a thought in her mind, not a word on her lips; conscious of no more than an incredibly placid vacancy and the realization that the worst was over.

  The kitchen fire had lapsed into a brilliant glow, unbroken by any flame. Her lids smarted; she had stared so long without blinking into its red. She must have been kneeling there for hours, thus lost in memory. Her glance swept up in dismay to the clock; and at that instant she heard the scraping of her husband’s latch-key in the lock – and his evening meal not even so much as laid yet!

  She sprang to her feet and, stumbling a little because one of them had ‘gone to sleep’, met him in the doorway. ‘I am late,’ she breathed into his shoulder, putting her arms round his neck with an intensity of greeting that astonished even his familiar knowledge of her. ‘But there were the children to get off. And then I just sat down by the fire a minute. Jim: don’t think I’m never thankful. You were kind to me that time I was ill. Kinder than ever you can possibly think or imagine. But we won’t say anything about that.’

  Her arms slipped down to her sides; a sort of absentness spread itself over her faintly-lit features, her cheeks flushed by the fire. ‘I’ve been day-dreaming – just thinking: you know. How queer things are! Can you really believe that that
Mr Simmonds is at the farm now, this very moment?’ Her voice sank lower. ‘It’s all snow; and soon it will be getting dark; and the cows have been milked; and the fields are fading away out of the light; and the pond with the reeds … It’s still; like a dream – and now …’

  And her husband, being tireder than usual that afternoon, cast a rather dejected look at the empty table. But he spoke up bravely: ‘And how did the youngsters get off? They must have been a handful!’

  He smoothed her smooth hair with his hand. But she seemed still too deeply submerged and far-lost in her memory of the farm to answer for a moment, and then her words came as if by rote.

  ‘“A handful”? They were – and that tiny thing! – I am sometimes, you know, Jim, almost afraid of those wild spirits – as if she might – just burst into tiny pieces some day – like glass. It’s such a world to have to be careful in!’

  1 As printed in The Picnic and Other Stories (1941). First published in The Queen, November 1924.

  The Lost Track

  8 Ranley Street,

  S.W.2.

  My Dear James,

  You remember that night we stayed up talking – a week or two before Christmas, wasn’t it. Anyhow, not very long after I came back from America. It was a good talk – the kind that always reminds me of old sherry and Bath Olivers (yours the Amontillado); but there came a moment in it when – well, bubbles began to rise. It was soon after Bettie had looked in – tilting us that queer half-derisive glance women always reserve for men surprised in their natural haunts and habits. She gave us up in despair, said good-night, and went off to bed. At that moment, I remember, you were humped up over the fire and knocking out your pipe on the bars of the grate; and you remarked between the two halves of a yawn: ‘So you didn’t have any actual adventures, then? Worth talking about, I mean?’

  I smiled to myself as I looked at you through the smoke. Worth talking about! Perhaps, if you had been the least bit less complacent and insular you would have noticed that I made no reply. Your taken-for-granted was, of course, first, that I am not the sort of creature to whom anything worth happening happens, and next, that in any case things worth happening are not in the habit of happening ‘over there’.

  But in this particular case, you were wrong on both counts. At least, so I think. And from the moment when – as we steamed gently on – half-suffocated with home-sickness I caught my first glimpse of the low-lying lovely emerald of the Isle of Wight through a placid haze of English drizzle, I have been pining to share with you what I am going to tell you now. It sounds a little absurd to say that a promise given in America made this impossible until the day before yesterday; but so it is. But now that is done with. The whole episode is over and done with – so far at least as anything can be done with in a world where even the whirr of a grasshopper never ceases to echo.

  I suppose the smile with which I met your question was a sort of a lie – a colourless one, I hope. But even if I had answered you with the bare facts – you wouldn’t have believed me. Probably you won’t believe me now, though you are bound to confess human nature rarely writes a letter of this length merely to deceive without gain! And as you are off on Tuesday, and I shan’t see you for weeks, this had better not wait.

  Then again, it’s a pretty little habit of yours to assume that life in these days is all but played-out and that the only things worth much consideration are of the mind or by way of books. In other words, that the really raw material of life is fit only for the newspapers, the police-courts, and the ‘movies’. In a way I agree with you. I agree, I mean, that events are only of importance in relation to our Selves. If they make no appeal to the imagination, that is, they are mostly null and void. Now the amusing thing (at least, I suppose it is amusing) is that my American adventure is as raw as pickled cabbage. It is precisely the stuff that films and shockers are made of. I can see – for I have returned from their fountain-head – the appropriate newspaper headlines. I believe you will agree too that it is of the ‘twopence coloured’ variety, rather than the ‘penny plain’; and it continues to haunt me.

  I don’t see how things without any ‘meaning’ – whatever that may mean – can do that. On the other hand, I can’t be quite sure even of what I mean by its meaning. Still, there are things in life that drop like stones into a dark subterranean pool. One leans over, listens to the reverberations, hears them die away, looks up – and the grass is of a livelier green than ever, the sky of an incredible blue, and the butterfly on a tuft of thrift nearby a miracle.

  What follows then is merely a plain and precise account. It is not intended to titillate your fastidious taste in style. You need not even bother to read it if you feel disinclined. But if you do read it, I should like a word later on concerning one or two points in it that will suggest themselves; and this, by the way, is the first word I have breathed on the subject to a living soul …

  Time: Late-October; Scene: U.S.A.

  By a piece of real good fortune I had been staying a day or two a little south – south of Washington, at any rate. For I saw the country. I had then been in America about seven weeks. If I use the phrase ‘American hospitality’ you will probably shrug your thick shoulders and smile. The actual fact is, though, that that hospitality is (a) sincere; (b) boundless; and (c) may set one speculating a little closely on the English variety. From out of the bosom of one family into which I had been welcomed without the smallest hesitation or forethought I had sent on a letter of introduction to yet another American friend of English friends of mine: the usual kind of letter with the usual kind remarks concerning the bearer.

  The answer came by return of post. In brief: Would I give the signatories – husband and wife – the inexpressible happiness of remaining their guest for the rest of my days on earth. I had discovered from a map that they were living thirty miles or so beyond a fairly large town across country still further south and west – I am not going to mention any names yet. I set out. And as I was still only a novice in the land where a twenty-four hours’ railway journey is looked upon as a jaunt one can enjoy between tea and supper, the novelties were for me novelties still.

  The green-upholstered armchair in the vast metallic Pullman car, for example; the sound of the voices; the cut of the faces; the ecstatic bill of fare in the dining-car – you write your order on a slip – Turkey and Cranberries, Chicken Pie, Six-inch Oysters, Corn on the Cob (eaten monkey fashion), the divinest Scallops in the world: and Prices to match! Then, too, the courteous white-laundered waiters with hands and faces ranging from blackest ebony to creamiest cream; the ice; and, of course, the landscape. On and on.

  Rather neglected-looking woods and fields; suggesting that they are still scared by the encroachments of civilization; maize (‘corn’) in stook; pumpkins (punkins) in heaps; running water; wooden houses; and the occasional town – with its ancient buggy; its drug-store; its Fords (early fourteenth-century); and the dread knolling of one’s engine’s bell – surely, apart from that monster’s prehistoric trumpetings, the saddest sound in Christendom – as one’s huge metallic caravan edges slowly through Main Street.

  I am an excellent traveller, for throughout any journey in unknown parts I am in a continual effervescing state of anxiety and foreboding. I invariably expect to go astray, and as invariably hope, yet dread, that I shall. But you can’t (any more than your baggage) go far astray on any American railway, provided you can understand what the ‘conductor’ says.

  All went well. The black fellow, smiling on me like Friday’s long-lost father, gave me my ‘brush-off’ (not brush-up or brush-down, you will notice), and I (a little shamefacedly) gave him a quarter. He took out my suit-case – my grip – he let down the clanging steps, and deposited the wooden stool beneath them. I descended. And there, with open arms and angelic faces, stood two strangers who, as quickly as you can switch on an electric light in a dark room, were at once my friends – and for life, I hope. We got into their car; it was latish afternoon; and in about half an hour
were at their house. I had been talking so hard to my hostess that I had caught scarcely a glimpse of the view, though I had absorbed it through my pores, none the less.

  It was rather a queer meal, that first dinner that evening. I remember talking nineteen to the dozen and noticing how unusually brilliant a sparkle the silver and glass had, and also how much more violent my headache was than it had been in the train. I recalled the heated frequency of my visits to the little ice-water reservoir in the railway carriage. You drink it out of a small envelope. I got to bed, however, without saying anything. But next morning there was no disguising the fact that I had a rollicking temperature, pains in the limbs, aching at the back of the eyes and so on: all the usual symptoms.

  Did my host and hostess tack me up instantly in a piece of old sacking, replace me in their car, and dump me down on the nearest goods platform? Not a bit of it. Nor did they pour oil and smuggled wine into my wounds and pass me on with twopence to the nearest innkeeeper. They stood on either side of the bed, irradiated with delight. Now, if a stranger from over the seas were taken ill in my house, I should first assure him what an exquisite privilege and joy it would be to nurse him back to health again. And then I should go downstairs and muse gently how pitiful it is that mortality may be subject to ills so inconsiderate.

  Not so my friends in America (and no names yet, so we will call them Flora and John). They were enraptured. Their eyes shone with triumph as they brandished the thermometer. If you’d only die, they all but assured me, we’d give you a costlier funeral than ever was on sea or land. Bricks, both of them.

  The doctor – the doc – came, saw, and sent me a bottle of medicine. It was ’flu, of course, and for days together I lay there, in Luxury’s ample lap, looking out from my bed through a window over the countryside, reading Isabel Ostrander, Freeman Wills Crofts, with interludes of O. Henry, nibbling grapes, and imbibing beef-juice – not to speak of oysters and champagne (think of it) in due season.