Short Stories 1927-1956
Walter de la Mare
SHORT STORIES 1927–1956
Edited by
GILES DE LA MARE
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Abbreviations
STORIES IN COLLECTIONS
ON THE EDGE: SHORT STORIES (1930)
A Recluse
Willows
Crewe
At First Sight
The Green Room
The Orgy: An Idyll
The Picnic
An Ideal Craftsman
THE WIND BLOWS OVER (1936)
‘What Dreams May Come’
Cape Race
Physic
The Talisman
In the Forest
‘A Froward Child’
Miss Miller
The House
A Revenant
‘A Nest of Singing-Birds’
The Trumpet
A BEGINNING AND OTHER STORIES (1955)
Odd Shop
Music
The Stranger
Neighbours
The Princess
The Guardian
The Face
The Cartouche
The Picture
The Quincunx
An Anniversary
Bad Company
A Beginning
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
The Lynx
A Sort of Interview
The Miller’s Tale
A:B:O.
UNPUBLISHED STORIES
The Orgy: An Idyll, Part II
Late
Pig
Dr Iggatt
Bibliographical Appendix
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
When Walter de la Mare brought out his first collection of short stories called The Riddle in 1923 at the age of fifty, it would have been a surprise to some to discover how long he had been attracted by the genre. Few people would have guessed that his earliest published works had been stories. His first printed story, ‘Kismet’, had appeared in The Sketch in August 1895, and at least seven others had been serialized before the publication of Songs of Childhood in 1902. De la Mare continued writing and re-writing stories throughout the rest of his life. The Riddle was followed in quick succession by Ding Dong Bell, Broomsticks (for children), The Connoisseur, On the Edge, The Lord Fish (for children), and The Wind Blows Over in the 1920s and 1930s; and his very last major work, A Beginning, came out in 1955 less than a year before his death.
Apart from the Collected Stories for Children of 1947, he did not publish any comprehensive collection of stories comparable to the Collected Poems of 1942, although there were several selections from the eight main collections. The most important of these (since de la Mare was involved in the choice on both occasions) were Stories, Essays and Poems of 1933 published in the Everyman series and Best Stories of Walter de la Mare of 1942 published by Faber – who brought out all the major collections after The Connoisseur. The latter came out with Collins in 1926, The Riddle and Ding Dong Bell having appeared with Selwyn and Blount in 1923 and 1924, and Broomsticks with Constable in 1925. All in all, seventy-nine stories were published in collections, and over a score of them have never been reprinted elsewhere. The three volumes making up the first complete edition include all these stories together with all the uncollected stories that have been found and a few unpublished ones.
De la Mare was as assiduous in serializing his stories before publication as he was in serializing his poems. Indeed, no less than sixty of the seventy-nine ‘collected’ stories were first published in magazines, newspapers or collections compiled by other people. When they appeared in volume form, which might be over fifty years later as happened with ‘The Quincunx’, they were often revised. (The interval between writing and serialization or publication in a collection could also be enormous: for example, ‘A Beginning’, which was published in the volume of that title in 1955, seems to have been written in about 1900, and ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which was serialized in December 1955, was probably written about then as well.) But not all the stories that were serialized were collected. This is particularly true of the period 1895–1910 and altogether eighteen uncollected stories have so far been found. In all likelihood, de la Mare deliberately did not reprint some of them. There is, however, clear evidence that he intended to publish certain stories like ‘Kismet’, which was revised for publication in A Beginning but omitted from it at the galley-proof stage. Others may well have been forgotten in the course of time. As it is no more possible to determine the exact reasons for stories remaining uncollected than it was in the case of the poems, all the stories found have been included. They are printed in the order in which they were first serialized or published – in sections at the end of Short Stories 1895–1926 and Short Stories 1927–1956.
Although a number of stories in manuscript and typescript form were discovered among de la Mare’s papers, there only seemed to be good grounds for publishing four of them. Three of these had been omitted from A Beginning at the galley-proof stage, and the fourth was the second half of ‘The Orgy: An Idyll’ which was cut in two when it was published in 1930, probably because it was too long. The unpublished stories follow the uncollected ones at the end of Short Stories 1927–1956.
The same general arrangement has been adopted as in the Complete Poems. The stories have been grouped chronologically according to the volumes in which they originally appeared. Short Stories 1895–1926 includes the first three main collections and uncollected stories from the earlier period; Short Stories 1927–1956 the last three main collections and uncollected and unpublished stories from the later period; and Short Stories for Children the two children’s collections.
With one or two exceptions, the text is based on the latest printed versions worked on by de la Mare, Stories, Essays and Poems (1938), Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942) and Collected Stories for Children (1947) being the three chief sources for these apart from the eight main collections. For further details, see the Bibliographical Appendix on page 555.
The contents of the three volumes are as follows:
I SHORT STORIES 1895–1926
Stories in Collections
The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)
Ding Dong Bell (1924, 1936)
The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)
Uncollected Stories
II SHORT STORIES 1927–1956
Stories in Collections
On the Edge: Short Stories (1930)
The Wind Blows Over (1936)
A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)
Uncollected Stories
Unpublished Stories
III SHORT STORIES FOR CHILDREN
Stories in Collections
Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925)
The Lord Fish (1933)
I am very grateful to the late Dorothy Marshall for help in tracking down uncollected stories and checking references, to Theresa Whistler for information about early manuscript versions, to Jill Foulston for her meticulous proof-reading of both this volume and Short Stories 1895-1926, and to Tom Knott for his very accurate and precise typesetting of the complex manuscript of this volume. The late Leonard Clark’s Checklist for the 1956 National Book League exhibition of de la Mare books and MSS has been a useful source of information.
Giles de la Mare
ABBREVIATIONS
MAIN COLLECTIONS
R The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)
DDB Ding Dong Bell (1924, 1936)
Br Broomsticks and Other Stories (1925)
C The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)
OE On the Edge: Short Stories (1930)
LF The Lord Fish (1933)<
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WBO The Wind Blows Over (1936)
Beg A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)
OTHER COLLECTIONS
SSS Seven Short Stories (1931)
SEP Stories, Essays and Poems (1938)
BS Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942)
CSC Collected Stories for Children (1947)
CT The Collected Tales of Walter de la Mare (1950)
SSV Selected Stories and Verses of Walter de la Mare (1952)
GS Walter de la Mare: Ghost Stories (1956)
uncoll uncollected
STORIES IN COLLECTIONS
ON THE EDGE: SHORT STORIES (1930)
A Recluse*
Which of the world’s wiseacres, I wonder, was responsible for the aphorism that ‘the best things in life are to be found at its edges’? It is too vague, of course. So much depends on what you mean by the ‘best’ and the ‘edges’. And in any case most of us prefer the central. It has been explored; it is safe; you know where you are; it has been amply, copiously corroborated. But, ‘Amusing? Well, hardly. Quite so!’ as my friend Mr Bloom would have said. But then, Mr Bloom has now ventured over the ‘borderline’. He is, I imagine, interested in edges no longer.
I have been reminded of him again – as if there were any need of it! – by an advertisement in The Times. It announces that his house, which he had himself renamed Montrésor, is for sale by auction – ‘This singularly charming freehold Residential Property … in all about thirty-eight acres … the Matured Pleasure Grounds of unusual Beauty’. I don’t deny it. But was it quite discreet to describe the house as imposing? A pair of slippers in my possession prompts this query. But how answer it? It is important in such matters to be clear and precise, and, alas, all that I can say about Mr Bloom can be only vague and inconclusive. As, indeed, in some respects he was.
It was an afternoon towards the end of May – a Thursday. I had been to see a friend who, after a long illness, seemed now to be creeping back into the world again. We sat and talked for a while. Smiling, whispering, he lay propped up upon his pillows, gaunt and deathly, his eyes fixed on the green branches beyond his window, and that bleak hungry look on his face one knows so well. But when we fell silent, and his nurse looked covertly round the door and nodded her head at me, I rose with an almost indecent readiness, clasped his cold, damp, bony hand in mine, and said good-bye. ‘You look miles better,’ I assured him again and again.
It is a relief to leave a sick room – to breathe freely again after that fumy and stagnant atmosphere. The medicine bottles, the stuffiness, the hush, the dulcet optimism, the gauche self-consciousness. I even found myself softly whistling as I climbed back into my cosy two-seater again. A lime-tree bower her garage was: the flickering leafy evening sunshine gilded the dust on her bonnet. I released the brake; she leapt to life.
And what wonder? Flora and her nymphs might at any moment turn the corner of this sequestered country road. I felt adventurous. It would be miserably unenterprising to go back by the way I had come. I would just chance my way home.
Early evening is, with daybreak, May’s most seductive hour; and how entrancing is any scene on earth after even a fleeting glance into the valley of shadows – the sun-striped, looping, wild-flowered lanes, the buttercup hollows, the parsleyed nooks and dusky coppices, the amorous birds and butterflies. But nothing lovely can long endure. The sickly fragrance of the hawthorns hinted at that. Drowsy, lush, tepid, inexhaustible – an English evening.
And as I bowled idly on, I overtook a horseman. So far as I can see he has nothing whatever to do with what came after – no more, at most, than my poor thin-nosed, gasping friend. I put him in only because he put himself in. And in an odd way too. For at first sight (and at a distance) I had mistaken the creature for a bird – a large, strange, ungainly bird. It was the cardboard box he was carrying accounted for that.
Many shades lighter than his clothes and his horse, it lay on his back cornerwise, suspended about his neck with a piece of cord. As he trotted along he bumped in the saddle, and his box bumped too. Meanwhile, odd mechanical creature, he beat time to these bumpings on his animal’s shoulder-blade with the little leafy switch poised between his fingers. I glanced up into his face as I passed him – a greyish, hairy, indefinite face, like a miller’s. To mistake a cardboard box for a bird! He amused me. I burst out laughing; never dreaming but that he was gone for ever.
Two or three miles further on, after passing a huddle of tumbledown cottages and a duck-pond, I caught my first glimpse of Mr Bloom’s house – of Montrésor. And I defy anybody with eyes in his head to pass that house unheeded. The mere quiet diffident looks of it brought me instantly to a standstill. ‘Imposing’!
And as I sat on, looking in on it through its high wrought-iron gates, I heard presently the hollow thump of a horse’s hoofs in the muffling dust behind me. Even before I glanced over my shoulder, I knew what I should see – my man on horseback. These narrow lanes – he must have taken a short cut.
There rode a Miller on a horse,
A jake on a jackass could do no worse –
With a Hey, and a Hey, lollie, lo!
Meal on his chops and his whiskers too –
The devil sowed tares, where the tare-crop grew –
With a Hey, and a Hey, lollie, lo!
Up he bumped, down he bumped, and his leafy switch kept time. When he drew level, I twisted my head and yelled up at him a question about the house. He never so much as paused. He merely lowered that indiscriminately hairy face of his a few inches nearer me, opened his mouth, and flung up his hand with the switch. Perhaps the poor fellow was dumb; his rawboned horse had coughed, as if in sympathy. But, dumb or not, his gesture had clearly intimated – though with unnecessary emphasis – that Montrésor wasn’t worth asking questions about, that I had better ‘move on’. And, naturally, it increased my interest. I watched him out of sight. Why, as I say, I have mentioned him I scarcely know, except that for an instant there he was, at those gates – Mr Bloom’s – gates from which Mr Bloom himself was so soon to depart. When he was completely gone and the dust of him had settled, I turned to enjoy another look at the house – a protracted look too.
To all appearance it was vacant; but if so, it could not have been vacant long. The drive was sadly in need of weeding; though the lawns had been recently mown. High-grown forest trees towered round about it, overtopping its roof – chiefly chestnuts, their massive lower branches drooping so close to the turf they almost brushed its surface. They were festooned from crown to root with branching candelabra-like spikes of blossom. Now it was daylight; but imagine them on a still, pitch-black night, their every twig upholding a tiny, phosphoric cluster of tapers!
Not that Montrésor (or rather what of its façade was in view) was an old or even in itself a very beautiful house. It must have been built about 1750 and at second sight was merely of pleasing proportions. And then one looked again, and it looked back – with a furtive reticence as if it were withholding itself from any direct scrutiny behind its widespread blossoming chestnut trees. ‘We could if we would,’ said its windows, as do certain human faces; though no doubt the queer gesture and the queerer looks of my cardboard-boxed gentleman on horseback accounted for something of its effect.
A thin haze of cloud had spread over the sky, paling its blue. The sun had set. And a diffused light hung over walls and roof. It suited the house – as powder may suit a pale face. Even nature appeared to be condoning these artifices – the hollow lawns, the honeyed azaleas.
How absurd are one’s little hesitations. All this while I had been debating whether to approach nearer on foot or to drive boldly in. I chose the second alternative, with the faint notion in my mind perhaps that it would ensure me, if necessary, a speedier retreat. But then, premonitions are apt to display themselves a little clearer in retrospect! Anyhow, if I had walked up to the house, that night would not have been spent with Mr Bloom. But no, the house looked harmless enough, and untenanted. I pushed open
the gates and, gliding gently in under the spreading chestnut trees towards the entrance, again came to a standstill.
A wide, low, porte-cochère, supported by slender stone columns, sheltered the beautiful doorway. The metalwork of its fanlight, like that of the gates, was adorned with the device of a pelican feeding her young. The owner’s crest, no doubt. But in spite of the simplicity of the porch, it was not in keeping, and may have been a later addition to the house. Its hollow echoings stilled, I sat on in the car, idly surveying the scene around me, and almost without conscious thought of it. What state of mind can be more serene – or more active?
No notice whatever seemed to have been taken of my intrusion. Silence, silence remained. Indeed, in spite of the abundant cover around me, there was curiously little bird-song – only a far-away thrush calling faintly, ‘Ahoy! ahoy! ahoy! Come to tea! Come to tea!’ And after all it was the merry month of May, and still early. But near at hand, not even a wren shrilled. So presently I got out of the car, and mooned off to the end of the shallow, stone-vased terrace, stepping deliberately from tuft to tuft of grass and moss. Only a dense shrubbery beyond: yew, ilex, holly; a dampish winding walk. But on this – the western aspect of the house – there showed faded blinds to the windows, and curtains too – bleached by numberless sunsets, but still rich and pleasant in colour.
What few live things may have spied out the intruder had instantly withdrawn. I sighed, and turned away. The forsaken pierces quicker to the heart than by way of the mind. My green-winged car looked oddly out of place – even a little homesick – under the porch. She was as grey with dust as were my odd horseman’s whiskers. I had come to the conclusion – quite wrongly – that for the time being, at least, the place was unoccupied; though possibly at any moment caretaker or housekeeper might appear.