Best Short Stories of Walter de la Mare

 Something completely different: ‘The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare’.  Some of them are what the vulgar erroneously call ghost stories.  They are not.  Unsettling, bizarre, puzzling but not certainly supernatural, possibly so or more truly liminal events, at the portals to other states where you merge with the uncanny and yet do not submit to acceptance of it.  Was ‘Seatons Aunt’ a class of a witch or a psychic calling up forces.  Her irony:

"She sat down at the piano and ran her fingers in a flourish over the keys. 'What shall it be? How shall we capture them, those passionate hearts? That first fine careless rapture? Poetry itself.' She gazed softly into the garden a moment, and presently, with a shake of her body, began to play the opening bars of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata. The piano was old and woolly. She played without music. The lamplight was rather dim. The moonbeams from the window lay across the keys. Her head was in shadow. And whether it was simply due to her personality or to some really occult skill in her playing I cannot say; I only know that she gravely and deliberately set herself to satirize the beautiful music. It brooded on the air, disillusioned, charged with mockery and bitterness. I stood at the window; far down the path I could see the white figure glimmering in that pool of colourless light. A few faint stars shone, and still that amazing woman behind me dragged out of the unwilling keys her wonderful grotesquerie of youth and love and beauty.”

As you see, and as I have said before, the spectral shilling has sustained many fine writers.  Why not, only two subjects are worth considering said Yeats; sex and death.

‘Crewe’ opens in the waiting room of that great train junction:

"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 black-leathered furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have been 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!”

But he was not alone in it.

"At risk of seeming fastidious, I must confess that now he was near I did not much care for the appearance of this stranger. He might be about to solicit a small loan. In spite of his admirable greatcoat he looked in need of a barber, as well as of medicine and sleep—a need that might presently exhibit itself in a hankering for alcohol. But I was mistaken. He asked for nothing, not even sympathy, not even advice. He merely, it seemed, wanted to talk about himself. And perhaps a complete stranger makes a better receptacle for a certain kind of confidences than one's intimates. He tells no tales.”

That’s true.  The stranger is as good as a confessional.  de la Mare was probably a man who evoked stories. What he is told could be just the frake of overstrained nerves if we like a neat settling of our account with reality.  We can’t be sure, we ought not to be sure, our epistemic duty is to rest in uneasy dubiety.

The stranger tells his story without regard to the stance of his listener:

"As a philosopher this white-faced muffled-up old creature seemed to affect realism, though his reservations on the 'solid' had fallen a little short of it. Not thatmy reality appeared to matter much—beyond, I mean the mere proof of it. For though in the rather intimate memories he proceeded to share with me he frequently paused to ask a question, he seldom waited for an answer, and then ignored it. I see now this was not to be wondered at. We happened to be sharing at the moment this—for my part—chance resort and he wanted company—human company.”

In ‘The Orgy: an Idyll’ we are treated to the sumptuary excesses of young Philip Pim whose very rich uncle uses him as a messenger boy (errand boy) to fetch stuff from town and charge to his account.  It’s a Harrods type establishment.  He is to inherit his uncle’s money on the one condition that he keep his job at the bank for one year.  Colonel Pim has set him up in it but warns him that not a penny will he get if he loses the job.

"The fact was that Philip had never been able to add up pounds, shillings, and pence so that he could be certain the total was correct. His 9's, too, often looked like 7's, his 5's like 3's. And as 'simple addition' was all but his sole duty in the bank, he would not have adorned its premises for a week if his uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim, had not been acquainted with one of its most stylish directors, and was not in the habit of keeping a large part of his ample fortune in its charge. He had asked Mr. Bumbleton to give Philip a chance. But chances—some as rapidly as Manx cats—come to an end. And Philip's had.”

Well then, piqued by resentment he goes shopping on the uncle’s account ranging through every department.  He starts small with dressing cases.  A maharajah’s catches his eye at a mere 675 guineas:

"He pressed a tiny knob, the hinges yawned, and Philip's mouth began to water. It was in sober sooth a handsome dressing-case, and the shaft of sunlight that slanted in on it from the dusky window seemed pleased to be exploring it. It was a dressing-case of tooled red Levant morocco, with gold locks and clasps and a lining of vermilion watered silk, gilded with a chaste design of lotus flowers, peacocks, and houris, the 'fittings' being of gold and tortoise-shell, and studded with so many minute brilliants and emeralds that its contents even in that rather dingy sunbeam, appeared to be delicately on fire.”

You’re saying to yourself, Walter, Walter oh yes ‘The Listeners’.  You learnt it at school.  This is a neglected writer and if I don’t say much about the stories it is because I never disclose,  like Mother Superior I am an abyss of tact.

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