- Online
Critical Studies -
Back
To Main Contents
Back To Online Contents
Three Stories by Walter de la Mare (page 3)
Russell Hoban
'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.
<<<
Page 2 Next
Page >>>
