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Three Stories by Walter de la Mare
(page 4)
Russell Hoban
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.
