Three Stories By Walter de la Mare
Russell Hoban
Talk given at One-Day Conference on the Short Stories of Walter de la Mare
at King's College, University of London, 7 November 1996
"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller…' With those words
Walter de la Mare immediately became a friend to my mind. I was twelve or so
when I encountered his poem, 'The Listeners', and he's been a mind-friend ever
since. 'Is there anybody there?' is the question so often implicit in his writing:
his question to the shadows, to the dim places where the ordinary blurs into
something else. I've been living in England for over forty years; I came here
because of English writing - I wanted to be in the place where it was done.
Although I'd read all of Dicken's novels and most of Trollope with great satisfaction,
it was stories of the supernatural and the strange and fantastic that irresistible
pulled me here: tales by such as A.E. Coppard, Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.R. James,
Oliver Onions, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Charles Williams; they
take my mind to the places where it likes to be, territories beyond the accepted
boundaries of reality.
My favourite kind of
story is the smoky evocation at which de la Mare excels: with his perception
of the perhaps, his attention to the whispers of the unseen and his recognition
of those realities not always recognised, he spins invisible webs to catch the
unspoken. His imagination is unique in the completeness of its realisation,
its making real what he sees in his mind; whatever detail he offers - Miss Duveen's
mulberry petticoats, white stockings, and spring-side boots; the immense coils
of Miss Seaton's hair, the rings on her left hand and the small jet buttons
on her bodice; or the 'grained massive black-leathered furniture' of the first-class
waiting-room at Crewe - unerringly bring with them the person or the place of
which they are parts.
The imaginative projection
of which he was capable may or may not be shown in a little story told to me
by his grandson, Giles de la Mare, which appears in True Ghost Stories of
Our Own Time, compiled by Vivienne Rae-Ellis: Walter de la Mare and his
son Richard were intending to look at antique shops one afternoon when a friend
turned up unexpectedly. De la Mare didn't especially want to see this friend
but felt he had to stay and talk, and so the antique-shop expedition was called
off. That same afternoon two other friends went to a shop regularly visited
by de la Mare (and here I quote Vivienne Rae-Ellis): '…while they were looking
in the window the wife suddenly ran away from the shop in some sort of distress
and her husband went after her and said, "what on earth's the matter?" And she
said, "Well, I'm worried about Mr de la Mare because I could see a bureau through
him…" Ms Ellis goes on to report that Giles de la Mare remembered his father
telling him that the woman had seen the apparition of the poet in the shop heard
later that her own mother had died that day. Perhaps the woman who saw him was
especially tuned in at that particular time, but I prefer to think that it was
de la Mare's uncanny ability to put himself in the places he saw in his mind
that caused her to see him in the antique shop. I know that I'd not at all be
surprised to encounter him even now, forty years after his death, in the railway
station at Crewe.
Three of his short masterpieces
are models of the magical art of causing the reader to know a great deal more
that what is on the printed page: in 'Miss Duveen', 'Seaton's Aunt,' and 'Crewe'
the words don't spell things out; they function as a developing solution - washing
quietly over the white paper they cause a picture to appear in all its subtleties
and shadings, its light and its shadow.
As I look at these stories
now with the aim of introducing new readers to them I see that they differ structurally
from other stories both modern and traditional. The old style of short story
has a beginning, middle and end; the modern story is more likely to be episodic,
boneless - a glimpse, a mood a close-up of an hour or two. De la Mare's stories
have no apparent scaffolding - they are not so much held together by plot or
narrative line as energised and made firm by their dynamics: there is in each
of them an integrative action that gives them muscle and keeps them going in
your mind after the narrative is finished. I thought it might be quite a clever
thing to diagram these three things for you but when I came to do it I found
that for me all three diagrams would be the same, a pattern of overlapping waves,
like transmissions radiating from and to a number of points. Overlapping transmissions
and receptions and endless permutations of states of being are what these stories
are made of.
Everything works in
a de la Mare story. The first line of 'Miss Duveen' is: 'I seldom had the company
of children in my grandmother's house beside the river Wandle.' In the name
Wandle we hear suggestions of wand and fondle and wander.
Wands are used in magic; affection makes for fondling; feet wander, also minds.
The story is about a magical affection that grows between a boy whose feet wander
on stepping stones across the Wandle and a lady no longer young who is, in a
fond and magical way, somewhat wandering in her wits.
In any context water
heightens the effect, intensifying whatever mood it finds. In some mythologies
water is the road of the dead; writing from Japan, Lafcadio Hearn, in In
the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, speaks of 'the primitive idea of some
communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of the waters and the
world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls, that
the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm in those elfish little ships
of straw which are launched for them on the sixteenth day of the seventh moon.'
'Miss Duveen' is about the death of the heart, and the river that appears in
the first line is always mystically present. On the first page it 'was lovely
and youthful even although it had flowed on for ever, it seemed, between its
green banks of osier and alder'. Arthur, the narrator, says, 'I heard more talking
of its waters than any of the human tongue.' On the second page the river is
joined by the rain on the day when Miss Duveen first speaks to Arthur:
It was raining, the raindrops falling softly into the unrippled water, making their great circles, and tapping on the motionless leaves above my head where I sat in shelter on the bank. But the sun wasshining whitely from behind a thin fleece of cloud, when Miss Duveen suddenly peeped in at me outof the greenery, the thin light upon her face, and eyed me sitting there for all the world as if she were a blackbird and I a snail.
We all know what blackbirds do with snails. But when Miss Duveen,
hoping for the shelter of his innocence, cracks Arthur open on the stone of
his solitude, it is she who will be consumed. And all through the story the
great river of time that bears all things away flows with the waters of the
Wandle, meticulously observed in all its changing moods.
The emotional dynamics
of the story grow out of an interesting physical symmetry. We see the story
through the eyes of the boy Arthur who lives in his grandmother's house on this
side of the Wandle. The grandmother's garden slopes down to the water where
it faces the garden of Willowlea, the house where Miss Duveen lives with her
cousin, Miss Coppin, who knows best and thinks that 'too much company is not
expedient for' Miss Duveen. The narrow river can be crossed by stepping-stones.
On this side of the river, the house containing the unfriendly grandmother and
the lonely boy; on the far side, the other house containing the unpleasant cousin
and the lonely Miss Duveen. In their very first conversation across the water
Miss Duveen says to Arthur, 'I know you Arthur, very well indeed. I have looked,
I have watched; and now, please God, we need never be estranged… What is a little
brawling brook to friends like you and me?… I am Miss Duveen, that's not, they
say, quite the thing here', tapping here forehead. And she tells Arthur a great
truth:
One thing, dear child, you may be astonished to hear, I learned only yesterday, and that is how exceedingly sad life is… You really can have no notion, child, how very sad I am myself at times.In the evening, when they all gather together, in their white raiment, up and up and up, I sit on the garden seat, on Miss Coppin's garden seat, and precisely in the middle (you'll be kind enough to remember that?) and my thoughts make sad.' She narrowed her eyes and shoulders. 'Yes and frightened, my Child! Why must I be so guarded? One angel - the greatest fool could see the wisdom of that. But billions! - with their eyes fixed shining, so very boldly on me. I never prayed for so many, dear friend.
Thus Miss Duveen who, in a pause in her long speech, 'leaned her
head questionably, like a starving bird in the snow.' What happens in 'Miss
Duveen' has the quality of real life: suddenly everything is different from
how it was five minutes ago because someone or something that we thought was
on the other side of the river is now inside us for ever.
To return to what Miss
Duveen said at the outset of her astonishing monologue: 'And now, please God,
we need never be estranged.' 'Estranged'! Interesting word that. One doesn't
think of being estranged from a stranger - you be estranged from an old friend
or from you wife or husband; to be estranged from a stranger implies a previous
state of non-estrangement, or another place of being, perhaps, where no one
is a stranger. Maybe Miss Duveen has never been a stranger, has always lived
in that place in the heart where the broken birds sing.
'Child,' she calls Arthur:
'dear child' and 'my child'. Arthur's age is never given us but the boy I see
in my mind is nine or ten perhaps, pale and lonely. We learn in the first paragraph
that his mother and father are dead. 'My grandmother', he tells us, 'found no
particular pleasure in my company'. Miss Duveen, on her side of the Wandle,
is spoken to by her cousin, the perpetually angry Miss Coppin, 'as one might
talk to a post'. Recognising a fellow prisoner of solitude, one not corrupted
by grown-upness and the practical world, she opens her heart to him by slants
and glimpses, hints and obliquities in their pitiful little assignations - her
word - by the river Wandle. While her angels in their white raiment gather in
her mind, she trusts Arthur with her story that she offers like bits of drowned
and tear-stained letters plucked from time's uncaring river: a happy time in
a white sunny rambling house, she no long remembers where; a father who rode
a black horse; a mother walking in the garden in a crinolined gown; her elder
sister Caroline who married Colonel Bute and was drowned, her eyes blue as the
forget-me-not.
Their friendship reaches
its peak in a furtive little tea in the absence of Miss Coppin and their gaunt
maid-servant Ann. There is a saffron bun for Arthur, a grey pudding, and a plate
of raspberries gathered, he suspects, from his grandmother's canes. In a later
meeting she tells him of the gas that sings and roars all over the house while
she is not allowed even one bracket of her own. She shows him, 'threaded on
dingy tape, [a] tarnished locket' containing 'the miniature of a young, languid,
fastidious- looking officer'. 'Miss Coppin, in great generosity, has left me
this, ' she says. 'Some day, it may be, you, too, will love a gentle girl. I
beseech you, keep your heart pure and true. This one could not.' Later, violently:
'Pray, pray, pray till the blood streams down your face!'
'All are opposed…The
Autumn will divide us', she predicts. Summer passes into autumn and 'I begin
to see,' says Arthur, 'we were ridiculous friends, especially as she came in
now in ever dingier and absurder clothes.' He hides from Miss Duveen whenever
he can. When the first ice appears in the garden his grandmother tells him that
Miss Duveen's friends 'have been compelled to put her away.' Here is the last
paragraph:
I'm thinking now of Big Things in literature. It must be about fifty years ago that I read War and Peace. I know there were big things in it. I remember vaguely a great battle - was it the Battle of Boridino? Was there a Prince Andrey lying wounded among the dead and was Bonaparte looking down at him? I'm not sure but I know it was a big thing. Much more clearly I remember Ahab on that fateful third day of the chase when he harpoons Moby Dick and is caught by the hissing harpoon line and dragged to his death; certainly that was big. Jean Valjean's flight through the sewers of Paris; Hans Kastorp, with bayonet fixed, running through the mud singing Der Lindenbaum while the shells explode around him - these are all Big, and the question arises: are they bigger that what happened to Miss Duveen? Of course not. There is only the mortal tragedy to talk about; doing it in multiples or on horseback doesn't make it more important. Arthur's innocence and perfidy and gallant Miss Duveen's defeat loom as tall as the Sack of Constantinople or anything else you care to mention, but you need to be as good as de la Mare to bring them out of the cobwebs and the shadows of that consciousness that lives in all of us.But I now know the news, in spite of a vague sorrow, greatly relieved me. I should be at ease in the garden again, came the thought - no longer fear to look ridiculous and grow hot when our neighbours were mentioned, or be saddled with her company beside the stream
Now we come to 'Seaton's Aunt'. Miss Seaton is both a transmitter and a receiver,
so again I see the action under the narrative as intersecting wave patterns
going out and coming in.
'Seaton's Aunt' has
a complimentary relationship to 'Miss Duveen'. Again the narrator recalls a
boyhood encounter with the woman of the title; but where Miss Duveen is the
victim of the shadows Seaton's Aunt is a shadowy aggressor. In Robert Graves's
The White Goddess and in the work of other mythographers you can read
of the triple aspect of women as perceived by ancient primitive males and recorded
by modern scholarly ones: she is successively the maiden, the mother, and the
hag. In Indian mythology Shiva's beautiful consort Parbati becomes Kali the
destroyer with her necklace of skulls. The tendency of some female spiders and
other creepy-crawlies to dine on rather than with their mates has done little
to make us males feel more secure. On the other hand we have such remnants of
old religion as the stone figure called Sheela-Na-Gig protecting us all by displaying
her evil-averting pudenda on the corbal-table of Kilpeck Church and elsewhere.
Men have been impressed by the power of women in one way and another ever since
sex was invented but that is not my main theme here; it is sufficient to say
that Miss Duveen, despite her age, is the vulnerable maiden; and Seaton's aunt
is definitely at the other end of the spectrum, where Medusa lives.
In 'Miss Duveen' the
lady of the title gave us such hints and glimpses as enabled us to extrapolate
her history. In 'Seaton's Aunt' there is nothing so simple as that; it is completely
a character-and-atmosphere story, the two so intermingled that it is impossible
to separate them. The written narrative is mainly a framework within which the
reader is led to endless speculation about this woman who is literature's most
memorable creations. Poor Seaton! From the beginning his prospects don't seem
too good. 'From a boy's point of view', says the narrator, 'he looked distastefully
foreign with his yellowish skin, slow chocolate-coloured eyes, and lean weak
figure. Merely for his looks he was treated by most of us true-blue Englishmen
with condescension, hostility, or contempt.' Seaton, we fear, is destined to
become a victim.
Withers, the narrator,
is not at all a close friend of the unpopular Seaton but, full of gratitude
for 'a whole pot of outlandish mulberry-coloured jelly that had been duplicated
in [Seaton's] term's supplies', he promises to spend the next half-term holiday
with him at his aunt's house.
Seaton's aunt is first
seen from a distance:
…We were approaching the house, when Seaton suddenly came to a standstill. Indeed, I have always had the impression that he plucked at my sleeve. Something, at least, seemed to catch me back, as it were, as he cried, 'Look out, there she is!' She was standing at an upper window which opened wide on a hinge, and at first sight she looked an excessively tall and overwhelming figure. This, however, was mainly because the window reached all but to the floor of her bedroom. She was in reality rather an undersized woman, in spite of he long face and big head. She must of stood, I think, unusually still, with eyes fixed on us, though the impression may be due to Seaton's sudden warning and to my consciousness of the cautious and subdued air that had fallen on him at the sight of her. I know that without the least reason in the world I felt a kind of guiltiness, as if I had been 'caught'. There was a silvery star pattern sprinkled on her black silk dress, and even from the ground I could see the immense coils of her hair and the rings on her left hand which was held fingering the small jet buttons of her bodice. She watched our united advance without stirring, until, imperceptible, her eyes raised and lost themselves in the distance, so that it was out of an assumed reverie that she appeared suddenly to awaken to our presence beneath her when we drew close to the house.
Those
lines are quite wonderful for the way in which they present to us this woman
of power. I doubt that many aunts have been introduced with the word, 'Look
out, there she is!' We must then look up to see her because she's above us at
an upper window. This window opens wide on a hinge, giving us a sense of her
freedom to transmit her physical vibrations. It is a bedroom window, so behind
her is the night and whatever it brings. Her eyes are fixed upon Seaton and
Withers, and Withers feels 'caught'. The silvery star pattern on her black silk
dress suggests witchery and the immense coils of her hair suggests snakes. After
fixing her eyes on the boys she assumes a false reverie from which she rouses
herself to greet Withers and Smithers. When corrected, she says, 'Its much the
same,' making it clear that any friend of Seaton's is an interchangeable entity.
Then she offhandedly tells Wither's, the guest, to bring Seaton, the host, along
with him.
Perhaps I'm belabouring
the obvious but it's because I so admire what de la Mare does and doesn't do
in those lines. A lesser writer might of said:
There was something sinister about the woman; the silvery star pattern on her black silk dress was suggestive of the occult, and the snaky coils of her hair, her hooded eyes and hieratic stillness gave her an air of supernatural power.
De la Mare doesn't do that; he offers no opinion: Seaton's warning,
'Look out there she is!' makes us brace ourselves for something special. Then
young Withers tells us what he sees, how he feels, and what was said. Having
had the journey by train, farm cart, and foot, then the village (where Seaton
stops to buy rat poison at the chemist's), then the outbuildings, the garden
and Seaton's tadpole pond, we now, with this new data, find in our minds the
whole atmosphere of the time and the place. With only that one clue about his
feeling caught, we ourselves experience, exactly and in great detail, Wither's
encounter with that house and that presence. To be able to do this, to refrain
from over-describing but to provide that information that enables the reader
to live the event, is the index of de la Mare's mastery.
Most of the action of
the story is in Wither's three visits to the house of Seaton's aunt: the first
is when Withers and Seaton are schoolmates; the second is when Seaton is engaged
to be married; the third is after Seaton's untimely death. In each of these
visits the aunt makes her appearance in a psychologically choreographed set
piece in which the otherness of her reality dominates the scene. In 'Miss Duveen'
there was the unpleasant and domineering cousin; here we have the step-aunt
who is a physical oppressor. In both stories we are left with a feeling of the
narrator's moral guilt: although drawn unwillingly into a strange alliance,
he ought to have stood by the friend more staunchly than he did, even if ultimately
it would have made no difference. Perhaps that's why both stories have such
power - perhaps all of us recognise in ourselves some guilt, some regret for
something in the past that we ought to have done and did not do.
There isn't a great
deal of overt action in thus story. During a half-term holiday Withers goes
unwillingly with Seaton to the house of Seaton's aunt who is not really his
aunt but his mother's step-sister. The woman treats Seaton with contempt and
Seaton lives in terror of her. He tells Withers, 'I know that what we see and
hear is only the smallest fraction of what is. I know she lives quite out of
this. She talks to you; but it's all make-believe.' He claims that his aunt
is in league with the Devil, that she as good as killed his mother (although
he doesn't say how), and that she constantly spies on him, listening to every
thought he thinks. Furthermore he insists that the house is swarming with ghosts.
'She brings them in,' he says. Withers has strong doubts about all this, and
that night Seaton gets him out of bed to show him that his aunt has not been
asleep but was listening at the door. They go through the dark house to her
bedroom:
Seaton, with immense caution, slowly pushed open a door, and we stood together, looking into a great poll of duskiness, out of which, lit by the feeble clearness of a nightlight, rose a vast bed. A heap of clothes lay on the floor; beside them two slippers dozed, with noses each to each, a foot or two apart. Somewhere a little clock ticked huskily. There was a close smell; lavender and eau de Cologne, mingled with the fragrance of ancient sachets, soap, and drugs. Yet it was a scent even more peculiarly compounded than that.
Trapped
in the room as the aunt returns, the boys hide in a cupboard until she falls
asleep. In the morning 'in the mysterious fashion by which we learn each other's
secret thoughts without a syllable said,' Withers knows that she has followed
every word and movement of the night before. In Wither's second visit,
the occasion on which he meets Alice Outram, Seaton's fiancée, Miss Seaton,
in dim lamplight and with the light of the moon on the keys, plays Beethoven's
'Moonlight' Sonata, somehow satirising it, dragging 'out of the unwilling keys
her grotesquerie of youth and love and beauty.' For an encore she does an hymn,
A few More Years Shall Roll. Here are the words of the first verse, not
given in the story: A few more years shall
roll, A few more seasons come,
And we shall be with
those that rest Asleep within the tomb…
'She's a spider,' Seaton
tells Wither's. 'She hates me… I'm as good as done. You wait.' Withers does
wait, making his third visit on the spur of the moment after noticing that he's
had no news of the wedding. He finds Miss Seaton there, now nearly blind, but
no Seaton. Here follows part of their final conversation:
'You must find it very lonely, Miss Seaton, with Arthur away?'
'I was never lonely in my life', she said sourly. 'I don't look to flesh and blood for my company.When you've got to my age, Mr Smithers (which God forbid), you'll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won't seek company then, I'll be bound. It's thrust on you.' Her face edged round into the clear green light, and her eyes groped, as it were, over my vacant, disconcerted face. 'I dare say my nephew told you a good many taradiddles in his time. Oh, yes, a good many, eh? He always was a liar. What, now did he say of me? Tell me, now.' She leant forward as far as she could, trembling, with an intriguing smile.
Withers never does
get a straight answer from the old woman. Not until he's on his way back to
the railway station does he learn at the local butcher's shop that Seaton had
died three months ago, just before the wedding was to take place.
Reading this story again
I find myself wondering whether Miss Seaton was altogether an invention. She,
rather than any idea or plot, is clearly the reason for the story, a personage
so powerful that she simply could not remain untold. Did she actually exist
or did she rise up out of de la Mare's imagination or perhaps a dream and demand
to be put into words? I don't know, I've done no detective work. Certainly she's
as real as anyone else I know - realer in her crepuscular tenure and permanence.
Invested with the power of her unknown origins she drifts free of the story
to become an independent entity of mythic nature, a nexus for all kinds of thoughts
and glimmers moving through the lights and shadows, the dusks and small hours
of the mind.
Seaton hinted to Withers
that Miss Seaton would not be very pleased to meet those who would be waiting
for her when she departed this world. Richard de la Mare, talking to Robert
Robinson in a BBC radio interview, said that his father firmly believed in some
sort of life after death. This theme is further developed in 'Crewe', the most
technically complex of these three stories.
In 'Crewe' we have atmosphere
within atmospheres. The murky winter dusk envelops the first-class waiting room
which contains its own obscurity within which we find the stranger speaking
from the shadow-world that contains him. We have the Hesper plying the
deeps with its mysteries in the depths of the country. Each of these atmospheric
envelopes has an inside and an outside, a this side and an other
side.
The opening paragraph
of 'Crewe' immediately puts us on the inside of this envelope:
When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence that one may hope will never occur. One can hardly at any rate imagine it to have been designed by a really good man!
Having
thus been put into the murky winter dusk at Crewe we now learn that there has
been animated talk in the waiting room about newspaper reports of the last voyage
of a ship called Hesper. Something mysterious has happened on board but we aren't
told what it was. The name Hesper is not without resonances. The word refers
to the west: hespreides is Venus as the evening star. To go west means to hop
the twig, pop one's clog, hand in one's dinner pail, and so on. The hesperides
were the nymphs who guarded the golden apples in their garden in the west. Even
to those to whom the name is without meaning, there is still the sound of it
like a whisper in the ear that hints of something out of the ordinary. Having established this
westerly whisper in the dusk of the winter evening at Crewe, our narrator, weary
of talk of the mysterious doings aboard the Hesper 'had decided to seek
the lights and joys and coloured bottles of the refreshment room when a voice
from out of the murk behind me suddenly broke the hush. It was an unusual voice,
rapid, incoherent, and internal, like that of a man in a dream or under the
influence of a drug.' Now that we are set
fair for a journey into the shadows, the owner of the voice shows his 'flat
greyish face' and points us toward the western end of his story. 'Those gentlemen
who have just left us,' he says, referring to the departed travellers who'd
been talking about the Hesper, 'had no more notion of what they were talking
about than an infant in the cradle.' Now we can settle back
in confident expectation as de la Mare gives us more visual data. The man who
has broken the silence 'had shifted a little nearer and was now, his legs concealed,
sitting on the extreme edge of his vast wooden sofa - a smallish man, but muffled
up in a very respectable greatcoat at least two sizes too large for him, his
hands thrust deep into its pockets.' In other words, this little man has got
himself into something much too big for him. 'He continued to stare
at me,' says our narrator. 'You don't have to go to sea for things like that,'
he went on. 'And there's no need to argue about it if you do. Still it wasn't
my place to interfere. They'll find out all right - all in good time. They go
their ways.' Now the stranger comes
out of his obscure corner, warms 'his veined shrunken hands at the heap of smouldering
cinders in the grate under the black marble fireplace,' and seats himself opposite
the narrator who notes that he looks in need of a barber, medicine, and sleep,
and fears that he might be about to solicit a small loan. If you think of the
stranger as being played by Barry Fitzgerald in one of his seedier modes and
without the Irish accent you won't be too far off. The stranger's name
is Blake, and now he tells of his time in the 'depps of the country'. Not the
depps of the sea but the equally deep, as we shall see, depps of the country.
Blake tells the narrator
that he has been a gentleman's servant: 'first boot-boy under a valet, then
footman and helping at table, than pantry work and so on.' Blake's story is
of course enlivened with many pragmatic observations, metaphysical insights,
and interesting turns of phrase. He does not proceed along the straightest of
lines but tends to meander between the hedgerows of his thought. Blake's last situation
was with the Reverend William Somers, MA. The staff consisted of himself, a
young fellow of the name of George, and a woman who came in from the village
to char and cook and so on. The Reverend 'had a nice fat living…about fifty
pounds to the pigsty, with the vicarage thrown in.' The Reverend's will is mentioned
early on. The Reverend 'liked things as they should be.' Good old furniture,
good food, choice fruit in the garden, and no smoking in the house. 'An easy
place,' says Blake, 'if you forgot how quiet it was - not a sound, no company,
and not a soul to be seen. Fair prospects, too, if you could wait.' Blake was
to be remembered in the will if still in the Reverend's service. If any of the
staff 'went elsewhere, the one left was to have the lot.' Speaking of death, Blake
says, 'Who wants to go, I should like to ask. Early or late. And
nothing known of what's on the other side?…What I say is, keep on this side
of the tomb as long as you can. Don't meddle with that hole. Why? Because while
some fine day you will have to go down into it, you can never be sure while
you are here what mayn't come back out of it.' Blake is greatly concerned about
meetings that might take place on the other side. Little by little we find out
why. It is an exercise in involuntary disclosure. If you cut something out of
paper with scissors you have the positive shape of what you've cut out and the
negative shape of the hole in the paper. Blake, in his rambling discourse, offers
such positive shapes of people and events as he saw them but all the while the
negative shapes created at the same time shows us what he is. When I haven't read
this story for some time and I recall it, the first image I see in my mind is
the scarecrow whose look so bothers Blake at a point in the story which we'll
get to presently. Like the other two stories we've looked at, this one doesn't
march down the road from the beginning to end and then out of sight and away
- it circles continuously around those points fixed in the memory by de la Mare's
art. There they are in the
depps in the country: the Reverend and Blake and George and the woman from the
village and the gardener whom Blake now mentions for the first time when he
says that he, Blake, is the only left of that whole establishment. The vicarage,
Black says, was what they called haunted, and had even been 'exercised'. Apropos
of haunting and spooky noises, Blake says, 'What's this voice of conscience
that they talk about but something you needn't hear if you don't want to?' Blake's story goes round
and round as he stirs it with the spoon of his commentary, and random hints
rise to the top like bits of meat in a stew, such remarks as 'And what about
the further shore? It's my belief there's some kind of ferry plying on that
river. And coming back depends on what you want to come back for.' The
real story is told almost by default as more and more of Blake rises to the
surface of the stew. The trouble began, it
seems, with the gardener, Mengus, spelled Menzies - 'ginger hair, scanty, and
the same on his face, whiskers - and a stoop. He lived down at the lodge; and
his widowed daughter kept house for him, with one little as fair as she was
dark.' There were wrangles about Blake's picking fruit or a cucumber for the
salad in the gardener's absence. Mengus seems to have got into a temper about
that. Blake, on his side,
hospitably offering Mengus a drink now and then from his pantry, found that
'it came to become a kind of habit; and to be expected; which is always a bad
condition of things.' Meanwhile the Reverend, unaware of the gathering of storm
clouds, was growing feeble. Mengus, in the heat of a very dry August, begins
to avail himself of ardent sprits through the open pantry window without being
asked, while Blake watches him from behind the door. There are words between
them, and one morning Blake comes down to find one of his best decanters 'smashed
to smithereens on the stone floor…and out of revenge he (Mengus) filled the
pantry with wasps by bringing in over-ripe plums.' 'And so things went
from bad from worse..I had to call a halt to it,' says Blake. 'Then I thought
of George; not compromising myself in any way, of course, in doing so.'
Accordingly he says to that young man, 'George, a word in time save nine, but
it would be better from you than from me.' George, who seems not quite to have
both oars in the water, sees no flaws in this plan, and does as he is told.
After taking in this word in time Mengus ponders the situation, becomes a little cross, heightens his mood with ardent spirits, and confronts Blake. 'Where's that George?' he demands. 'Fetch him out, I say, and we'll finish it here and now.'
Blake, ever the voice
of reason, replies, 'I don't want to meddle in anybody's quarrels. So long as
George so does his work in this house as will satisfy my eye, I am not responsible
for his actions in his off-time and out of bounds.' Mengus comes off second
best in that conversation and Blake notices that he was 'looking a bit pinched,
and hollow under the eyes. Sleepness nights, perhaps.' He finds out later that
Mengus was under strain because his grandson was ill. That very evening Mengus
waylays George by the stables and rearranges his face somewhat. That Reverend,
noting George's condition, questions him closely, as a result of which Mengus
is given the sack with a quarter's wages in lieu of notice. Mengus has another
earnest talk with Blake in which he vows, come what may, here or hereafter,
he'll get even with George. Then he goes out to the barn and hangs himself. Blake now brings in
the subject of cremation, remarking that after 'all the moisture in us [has]
gone up in steam, what's left would scarcely turn the scales by a single hounce.'
This leads to a consideration of the possibility of putting in a posthumous
appearance:
If that's all there is to you and me, we shouldn't need much of the substantial for what you might call the mere sole look of things, if you follow me, if we chose or chanced to come back. When gone, I mean.
Just enough, I suppose, to be obnoxious, as the Reverend used to say, to the naked eye.
The Reverend,
having has a stroke on the night of the inquest after the death of Mengus, is
fading fast, almost at death's door. He's thanked Blake for all he's done, saying
he won't forget it and using the word 'substantial'.
Now the house is quiet
again but 'There was a strain, so to speak, as you went about your daily doings,'
says Blake. 'A strain. And especially after dark. It may have been only in one's
head. I can't say. But it was there…even George noticed it.'
Time passes and the
story continues to circle with the slow stirrings of Blake's spoon. It's early
September, and the stubble bleaching in the sun, when Blake notices a scarecrow
in the middle of the cornfield that lies beyond the stream. Early September
and nothing but stubble in the field and it didn't look like an old scarecrow.
He doesn't recall seeing it before but how could he have missed it? He observes
the scarecrow from several different positions. He looks at it through the Reverend's
binoculars. 'It wasn't the first time I'd set eyes on the clothes,' he notes,
'though I couldn't have laid name to them. And there was something in the appearance
of the thing, something in the way it bore itself up, so to speak, with its
arms thrown up to the sky and its empty face, which wasn't what you'd expect
of mere sticks and rags.' Also the air around it was 'sort of quivering.' George
looks through the binoculars as well and shares Blake's misgivings. Blake says
they must have a closer look some time. 'But not this afternoon. It's too late.'
It's taken Blake and
de la Mare quite some time to get to this scarecrow that remains in my memory
as the image around which the story revolves. To a lover of what is called the
supernatural (which I insist is only part of the natural) the scarecrow is a
strong satisfaction, absolutely top class, achieving its effect simply by offering
such data as draw the reader a little further into the realm of the perhaps
than one would ordinarily go. Like the horrible hopping creature in white that
dodges among the trees in M.R. James's 'Casting the Runes' this image is unforgettable
because who of us has not just such hopping things and scarecrows in the woods
and stubble fields of the farther corners of the mind? Like Miss Duveen, like
Seaton's aunt, the scarecrow draws to itself all manner of memories, moods,
and random fancies circling in the shadows.
I've already said the
story comes through Blake's maundering almost by default. The power of 'Crewe'
comes from the amount of action the reader is provoked into, the compelling
need to spoon those bits of meat out of the stew Blake's maddening circuitous
monologue.
The morning after that
first sighting the scarecrow isn't there. Blake brings in Occam's Razor: 'It's
no good in this world, sir, putting reasons more far-fetched to a thing than
are necessary to account for it.' Some farmer's lout, he tells himself, has
moved it.
By now there are only
Blake and George and the Reverend at the Vicarage. Blake doesn't go out at all
the next day, but when, at the upper windows that evening in the light of the
harvest moon, he picks up the binoculars he sees, before he uses the glasses,
rapid movement that suddenly fixes itself into the scarecrow when he focuses
on it.
That night there isn't
much sleep and there are various unexplained sounds outside the house. the next
night there are more noises and George puts his fears into words:
"Do you think, Mr Blake - you don't think he is come back again?'
"Who's, George, come back" I asked him.
"Why, what we looked at through the glasses at in the field,' he said. 'It had his look.'
'Dead
men tell no tales', says Blake. 'Let alone scarecrows. All we've got to do is
just make sure.' He tells George to have a look round on the outside while he
has a search through on the in. George, remembering Mengus's threat to get even,
is reluctant but Blake prevails and out goes George into the night.
Blake doesn't move at
all for a bit, sits on the bed feeling the weight of 'all that responsibility
and not knowing what might happen next':
Then presently what I heard was as though a voice had said something - very sharp and bitter; then said no more. Then came a moan, and then no more again. But by that time I was on my rounds inside the house, as I'd promised; and so, out of hearing; and when I got back to my bedroom again everything was still and quiet. And I took it of course that George had got back safe to his…
George,
I hardly need tell you, did not make it through the night. He was found in the
morning, 'cold for hours, and precious little to show why.' The Reverend having
been in due course gathered to his fathers, Blake's share of the will, it seems,
after the lawyers had done their work, wasn't anything much to boast about.
'I'm a free man, that's true,' he says. 'But for how long. Nobody can stay in
this world here for ever, can he? And though in this world you may not have
one iota of harm to blame yourself for to yourself, there may still be
misunderstandings, and them that have been deceived by them waiting for you
in the next. So when it comes to what the captain of the Hesper…' He is interrupted by
the porter who comes to put coals on the fire, the narrator's train arrives,
and Blake is left behind in the winter evening at Crewe. Where he remains, a
small person wearing something much too big for him. There are many writers
in this country who have fallen into undeserved obscurity. Often when I mention
Walter de la Mare I'm astonished to find that the person I'm speaking to has
never read anything of his. For myself, I find him so satisfying to me as a
reader and so instructive to me as a writer that I can't help telling people
about him. Today I've synopsised these three stories and offered what useful
comments I could in the hope that old readers will want to enjoy them again
and new readers will be drawn to discover on of England's national treasures.* This essay appeared in issue no 1 of The Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, 1998. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.