Short Stories 1895-1926

by Walter De la Mare

  My companion, during the few brief moments of our walk together, had seemed to be thinking – closely and rapidly. Now and again she turned as if to look at me or to speak to me, but desisted. I realized how anxious she was that I should keep my appointment with her; and yet just then was baffled to see why. It was not, I feel sure, from any want of confidence that her secret was safe with me. And on my side – well, my midnight ruminations were made none the happier by my implicit trust in her.

  We arranged that she should put a couple of stones in a certain position near the furthest wheelmarks of the car. ‘Turn back at once,’ she insisted, ‘if they are not there.’ This was her last injunction. She looked me steadily in the face without offering her hand – her eyes as serenely clear with inward depths and distances as the evening sky itself – and we parted.

  I had failed to tell her how little time was now left to me. John and Flora would be back on the Tuesday morning. In decency I could not stay beyond the Wednesday. Think of it! – to have to pack up my grip, go off on my travels again, and become a normal sociable being in a black bow and a Tuxedo after such an experience as that! It was mortifying to the last degree.

  It is still more mortifying to realize now that this experience is to all intents and purposes finally over, that I haven’t the faintest desire to see the place again – the house, I mean. I am not sure if I should even have wished to think of her there – growing old, growing listless, resigned. My mind becomes stupid and useless the moment I begin to reflect on this. Nor is it only because of what has happened since. The whole thing has slipped into my imagination, I suppose; and the imagination, as you yourself once observed, retains essences, not mere tinctures. And yet the whole experience remains not only a mortifying but a horrifying memory. If it is not absurd to say so – it terrifies me with its perplexity. I could never be ‘happy’ about it, even if – but wait. I started off the next afternoon – it was a Sunday, of course – some hours later than before. This bothered me a little because it would entail my returning after dark. And though my road by now was fairly familiar, it would be none too easy for me to pick it out in the dark. As you know, I am little short of an idiot at finding my way. It would be nothing but a nuisance just then to have to spend the night in the woods, and there were excellent reasons for not converting the car into a travelling pharos on my return journey. So I kept a sharp eye on the road’s turns and twistings, and having left the car some little distance down the hill, I followed the path past the track in the ravine, found the pre-arranged signal, and pushed on until I came to a semi-circular break in the woods, well above the precipitous descent at the foot of which was the house. By craning forward a little under a weeping willow I could now get a glimpse of one corner of its roof.

  The evening was twin-sister to its predecessor – as quiet as a peep-show. Another sun-drenched day was drawing to its end – a day that throughout its course had remained so serene and still that one could with ease have counted the leaves that had fallen since its dawn. It was fascinating to stare at that edging of roof, realizing that beneath it was concealed a magnet potent enough to enslave every desperado and cut-throat this wicked world contains.

  The lady was late but made no comment on that. She appeared quietly at my side and must have ascended the ravine by some path unknown to me. For a moment or two in her odd way she looked at me without speaking while she recovered her breath. She was without a hat, and wore the same faded blue gown that had haunted my miserable dreams in the dark of the night before. She was naturally pale, though her skin was slightly tanned; and she held herself upright as if by conscious habit. And if she looked at one at all, she turned her head completely to do so – never glancing out of the tail of her eye. Throughout her brief talk I detected no single wile or trick or hint of the ancient feminine – which is intended neither as a compliment nor the reverse. One merely gets accustomed to things.

  Even in that dying twilight she looked a good deal older than I had assumed her to be. Her face was one you find yourself speculating about – exploring – even while you are actually talking to the owner of it: those dark, straight eyebrows; the wide, light, open eyes; the gold-streaked hair. A longish face, and not easily ‘read’, explored, analysed.

  It seemed, too, to be strangely, incredibly familiar to me. It was as if we had lived together, she and I, for years at a stretch, had parted and had now met again after a prolonged absence; and yet as if that meeting had been a bitter disappointment and disillusionment. I cannot account for this except by supposing that into a moment of acute sensibility – some sudden drop of the mind into the deeps – one may condense a prolonged experience. Imaginatively exhaust it, so to speak. That few instants’ intimacy had been too much for human nerves and hearts. I felt desperately listless, yet afflicted and aggrieved. Circumstances had betrayed me; I had turned from the first to the last chapter of my tale of mystery and somehow its glamour had gone. How can I explain myself ?

  Circumstantially all had been well. Her husband had noticed nothing amiss. ‘And even live men sometimes tell no tales, it seems!’ she faintly smiled at me. ‘I believed you would come, and yet – well of course I could not be certain if I should ever see you again.’

  We sat down awhile in that tepid air, beneath the brilliant but now darkened autumnal branches, and she told me her story in her own languid, uninterested, broken fashion; our voices falling lower yet when, presently after, we rose again and wandered on a little further up the hill until at last we could actually see through a crevice of the trees (though we ourselves remained hidden) the window of the sanctuary itself.

  It was an outlandish story, and, like the one I am telling you, of the ‘shocker’ variety. But I have no reason to disbelieve it. It would never occur to me indeed to mistrust a single word she uttered. There was a tinge of the sleepwalker in all she said and did.

  The house, it seemed, had been built by the grandfather of the present owner, a quixotic creature who had fought – and fought fiercely – in the Civil War. He was killed early in ‘sixty-five, leaving an only son, a boy of sixteen or so, though how this youngster had himself escaped being roped into the army even at that early age I don’t know. Until then he had been left in charge of faithful negro servants at home. The family was old and well-to-do if not wealthy, but even before the war had been slipping into the shade.

  The boy’s grandfather had formerly owned a large property further south with its usual complement of slaves, but had lost most of it by sheer neglect and by reason of his habit of wandering off on long and apparently aimless journeys over the countryside. He seems to have been a natural vagrant – in search of Mecca, maybe.

  On one of these expeditions he had chanced on this ravine. Its beauty and isolation alone might have been fascination enough, but there was also apparently something in the soil that attracted his attention, and he discovered too that this particular ‘desirable site’ had once been the scene of a violent convulsion of nature, during which it welcomed a visitor more alarming (though less extensive in effect) than Columbus himself.

  An enormous meteorite had found here its earthly abiding-place. I suppose such things are not so rare as one supposes. There must be scores of them in the oozy bed of old Ocean. There is a famous one, isn’t there, in the wilds of Arizona? It was his son, who, some time in the ’eighties, succeeded at last in blowing a huge fragment of this meteorite to smithereens with a stick of dynamite. No one seems to have had an inkling of what he hoped to discover in its entrails. What he did discover, however, brought his labours in this world to an end. Up till then the ravine had been used in a modest way as a stone quarry; hence the low-gauge railway. After the night of that explosion the industry ceased – for the owner of it had disinterred from amongst the slag and refuse left by his experiment the diamond down below. It must have been a queer and shattering moment. The effect on him seems to have resembled that of a wild Southern love-affair; it changed his complete existence.

  A
t that time the lady’s husband must have been a boy in his early teens, and had already as a child been initiated into the company of this peculiar prey in what I gathered was little short of a religious ceremony. I can see it, too, the narrow, dark, pallid boy open-eyed in that radiance, and the father (to judge from one of the portraits I saw) of the Old Abe type – an early ‘highbrow’, with a beard. Oddly enough I heard nothing of the mother, but whether or not she or any one else knelt there with these two at that ceremony, I wish Vermeer could have been there to paint it. This boy, no doubt as time went on, came to think of the stone as a kind of symbol of the Lost Cause – and of his lost cause. Some ghastly shock to nerve and mind during the war had intensified an hereditary bent and left him a prey to intense melancholy and depression. It was he who had found for the gem its wooden sentinel seraphs and had hung up that sun in the shrine I have described. It seems to have become a refuge for his tormented spirit, the holy place not only of this indestructible emblem and of the ravaged South, but of his own half-broken insatiable spirit and possibly much else besides.

  I can just imagine how in these surroundings and with his temperament it must have vivified and infatuated that languid and rich Southern imagination which even to this day has never broken fully into flower. Fantastic, I admit. But remember that this thing was literally ex-terrestrial, a visitant from the wilds (or the serene) of ‘space’, of the unknown, of the dreamed of. Nowadays we rap on a table and are presented with ectoplasm and similar evidences. On the other hand all pioneers, surely, in their exploitations even of the material world have had some twist and contortion of fantasy in their minds. This one’s delight and desire were not in the gross world of the senses but in the regions of the mind. He had turned contemplative. It is easy to mock at him shut up, up there, in the silence with his talisman for whole nights together – the solitude, the intense heat of summer, the icy gales of winter, in that aloofness from most of what we mean by life. But in such times as ours is it worth while?

  That black-haired creature then in saturnine cape and hat whom I myself had seen glide like an automaton into view and glide out of it again on the abandoned track, had sucked in his father’s superstitions with his milk. His mind had been doubly dyed. He still secreted an implacable abhorrence of the North – an attitude, surely, nowadays only very faintly shared by any other living creature. But this was but one peculiar ingredient in the make-up of his extraordinary consciousness. Some day I will tell you a little more about him; but I doubt if my informant for an instant realized how queerly many of her intimate confidences that evening fell upon that cold, calm Englishman’s ear.

  While she talked, I listened and mused. It would be agreed I suppose that the winning side in that cruel and bloody Civil War has not hidden its own bright particular gems under a bushel. It has surged on from strength to strength. It has more diamonds to show than Beelzebub has flies. None the less even to-day in that vast half-ravished country of theirs there must be scores of half-hidden Koh-i-noors still waiting to be shared around – natural resources eagerly expecting the rap of some millionaire Moses’s rod to pour out their abundance into the lap of these Nordic adventurers. Our own potentialities are now less abundant. It is a remarkable phenomenon. It sets one thinking – the problem, I mean, of hoarding versus exploiting; the problem of spiritual intensity versus material enterprise; of imaginative intuition versus man’s mere reasoning powers. It sets me thinking of my own part in that afternoon’s adventure. That inescapable law – the immutability of one’s past!

  Down there (as we sat in our moment’s peace together), down there under cover of this shag of dusky woodlands lay concealed this incredible bauble which, if it emerged into our civilized world, would instantly knock the bottom out of the diamond market, and would awaken in scores of human hearts the vilest passion of which they are capable. There may be nothing much in that. But why should the mere memory of it have affected the very life and light of me, have sunk deep down into the depths of consciousness wherein all our ‘longings, dreams, and aspirations lie’? What strange inward radiance had shone on me that solemn hour? The problem – absurd though it may sound – continues to enthral me.

  I stirred and looked round at her. For the moment I had not been listening. Perhaps that dark Edgar-Poe-like creature was even at this moment at his orisons! Night had been advancing while we talked and a stealthy moon-pale radiance lay over the wooded landscape spread out beneath us. And still this lady’s low uneven voice in her peculiarly tortuous manner continued telling me her outlandish story, though I knew in my heart that she was sick to death of the whole business. For her its interest had long since worn through and was now worn out. The situation had become an unendurable burden and obstacle.

  On the other hand, her mind was still obviously dominated by the presence and influence of her husband; though I rather doubt from what she said – mere inference, of course – if she had ever been for more than a little while in love with him. The momentary bonfire had burned itself out or been swiftly extinguished, and she had slipped apparently into the part of the childless mother, with this egocentric fanatic for protégé.

  That is the position as it seemed to me then, as on reflection it seems to me now. Not that her husband was stark staring mad, only a little crazy. There are too few of his kind in this world. I wish there had been an opportunity of meeting the creature. Like nature with her sunsets, life, it seems, is beginning to mimic men’s movies. The more I think of it, the more melodramatic the situation becomes. I hate fingering over, as Keats says, other people’s domesticities. But it was plain from what she told me that for many years past a silent, continuous, but none the less embittered war of the spirit must have been raging between these two poor human derelicts.

  Maybe she herself was a pace or two over the borderland. Like most people who are accustomed to solitude she would now and then forget as it were to go on talking, her eyes fixed meanwhile as if in reverie or in contemplation of some thought or feeling which she was anxious but loth or unable to express. Her eyes indeed had that half-vacant look in their beauty of those who day-dream. They seemed to divine rather than observe. And though she uttered no word to suggest she was unhappy, the tones of her voice, every instinctive gesture of her hands, told the same tale. There are sorrows and misgivings in every mind which we as human creatures shrink from revealing – that of growing old, for example; of falling short of one’s poor best. But this was a canker much nearer home even than these. It was at her heart. She had been ‘confined into a cage’ and had long since begun to realize what that means – even though freedom might prove nothing but a treachery and a delusion. Then, suddenly, had appeared this interloper from the great Outside – and had reminded her of her childhood and of England.

  I see as I write the troubled simplicity that lightened her face as she spoke of it. The very ghost of childhood returned into it. Her own small daughter, if she had ever had one, might have looked like that – the young moon in the old moon’s arms. Not, I suppose, that I am to blame for that, any more than the executioner’s axe is to blame for the mute head in the basket of sawdust.

  She has had her revenge, too; for now as I sit here, wasting my time and all this ink, and return in fancy to her Virginia, ‘my heart aches and a drowsy numbness fills my sense, As though of hemlock I had drunk’. It is useless to attempt to follow the inward workings of one’s mind. All may seem quiet, and in repose there; and then you realize – by the weedy flotsam, the rollers, the screaming of the birds and the wreckage – the storm that is now over. However that may be, it is nothing but the truth to say that the faintest memory of her Virginia – the mere sound of the word makes me as homesick as a cat. Homesick, and I know not what else besides.

  She can’t have foreseen that. I must have appeared repulsively cold and indifferent – but I hope not mistrustful. You appear what you feel, feign as you may. I had butted in, then; unforgivably if you consider how. But apart from that, and far worse, it b
ecame clearer and clearer to me while we talked or sat silent that she had seen in me her long-deferred opportunity to escape. I was the fate-ordained saviour come to rescue her from the island on which she had been so long marooned. Even to suggest the faintest consciousness of such a thing may seem incredibly raw and ugly, if not worse. But there it is. Remember too, that the actual rights and wrongs of the problem did not so much as even arise. Maybe I should not now be loathing myself like this if they had. Yet it was not exactly cowardice that kept them back. All I can say is that I listened to these undertones in a fever of disquiet and perplexity.

  I listened; but after all, the thread that skeins up even the most sophisticated heart is tied only with a slip knot. And how I wish I could give you the faintest notion of the marvel of that scene and night. The first thin silver of a crescent moon had come into the sky low down in the west and was being dogged by a planet glassy as a raindrop by candle-light. The blue above our heads was of a depth and brilliance that no Chinaman even has succeeded in putting on paper or clay. And there was I – the doors of understanding, of compassion, even of mere humanity shut and bolted – gently, insistently temporizing; and she zigzaggedly insinuating her long-suppressed desires, aspirations and anxieties into my mind.

  ‘What is he going to do with the thing when he goes?’ I croaked at last. Can you imagine a more idiotic question in the circumstances? Think how it might have been taken! But the faintest subterfuge was impossible to her. She did not ‘take it’ at all; she replied as simply as a child that the diamond was to be buried with him: ‘interred with his bones’! He had long since arranged, it seems, that the two old servants who from his infancy had watched over him as closely as guardian angels, were to dispose of his body so that not even the privy wolves of Hatton Garden could dig it up again. And Providence itself had made this possible.