Read Online Short Stories 1895-1926 by Walter de la Mare - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter de la Mare
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things â a ring â books â he spoke often ââ
She turned and confronted me, speechless entreaty in her blind face â an entreaty not to me, for no earthly help, past all hope of answer, it seemed; and then, with an extraordinary certainty of aim, she began beating my hand that lay upon the narrow window-frame with the handle of her ebony stick.
âDrive on, drive on!â she cried. âGod bless the man, why doesnât he drive on?â The jet butterflies in her bonnet trembled above her crimsoned brow. The cabman brandished his whip. And that was quite the end. I never saw my aunt again.
1 First published in Ladyâs Realm, July 1907.
The Looking-Glass
The Looking-Glass
For an hour or two in the afternoon, Miss Lennox had always made it a rule to retire to her own room for a little rest, so that for this brief interval, at any rate, Alice was at liberty to do just what she pleased with herself. The âjust what she pleased,â no doubt, was a little limited in range; and âwith herselfâ was at best no very vast oasis amid its sands.
She might, for example, like Miss Lennox, rest, too, if she pleased. Miss Lennox prided herself on her justice.
But then, Alice could seldom sleep in the afternoon because of her troublesome cough. She might at a pinch write letters, but they would need to be nearly all of them addressed to imaginary correspondents. And not even the most romantic of young human beings can write on indefinitely to one who vouchsafes no kind of an answer. The choice in fact merely amounted to that between being âinâ or âoutâ (in any sense), and now that the severity of the winter had abated, Alice much preferred the solitude of the garden to the vacancy of the house.
With rain came an extraordinary beauty to the narrow garden â its trees drenched, refreshed, and glittering at break of evening, its early flowers stooping pale above the darkened earth, the birds that haunted there singing as if out of a cool and happy cloister â the stormcock wildly jubilant. There was one particular thrush on one particular tree which you might say all but yelled messages at Alice, messages which sometimes made her laugh, and sometimes almost ready to cry, with delight.
And yet ever the same vague influence seemed to haunt her young mind. Scarcely so much as a mood; nothing in the nature of a thought; merely an influence â like that of some impressive stranger met â in a dream, say â long ago, and now half-forgotten.
This may have been in part because the low and foundering wall between the empty meadows and her own recess of greenery had always seemed to her like the boundary between two worlds. On the one side freedom, the wild; on this, Miss Lennox, and a sort of captivity. There Reality; here (her âdutiesâ almost forgotten) the confines of a kind of waking dream. For this reason, if for no other, she at the same time longed for and yet in a way dreaded the afternoonâs regular reprieve.
It had proved, too, both a comfort and a vexation that the old servant belonging to the new family next door had speedily discovered this little habit, and would as often as not lie in wait for her between a bush of lilac and a bright green chestnut that stood up like a dense umbrella midway along the wall that divided Miss Lennoxâs from its one neighbouring garden. And since apparently it was Aliceâs destiny in life to be always precariously balanced between extremes, Sarah had also turned out to be a creature of rather peculiar oscillations of temperament.
Their clandestine talks were, therefore, though frequent, seldom particularly enlightening. None the less, merely to see this slovenly ponderous woman enter the garden, self-centred, with a kind of dull arrogance, her louring face as vacant as contempt of the Universe could make it, was an event ever eagerly, though at times vexatiously, looked for, and
She turned and confronted me, speechless entreaty in her blind face â an entreaty not to me, for no earthly help, past all hope of answer, it seemed; and then, with an extraordinary certainty of aim, she began beating my hand that lay upon the narrow window-frame with the handle of her ebony stick.
âDrive on, drive on!â she cried. âGod bless the man, why doesnât he drive on?â The jet butterflies in her bonnet trembled above her crimsoned brow. The cabman brandished his whip. And that was quite the end. I never saw my aunt again.
1 First published in Ladyâs Realm, July 1907.
The Looking-Glass
The Looking-Glass
For an hour or two in the afternoon, Miss Lennox had always made it a rule to retire to her own room for a little rest, so that for this brief interval, at any rate, Alice was at liberty to do just what she pleased with herself. The âjust what she pleased,â no doubt, was a little limited in range; and âwith herselfâ was at best no very vast oasis amid its sands.
She might, for example, like Miss Lennox, rest, too, if she pleased. Miss Lennox prided herself on her justice.
But then, Alice could seldom sleep in the afternoon because of her troublesome cough. She might at a pinch write letters, but they would need to be nearly all of them addressed to imaginary correspondents. And not even the most romantic of young human beings can write on indefinitely to one who vouchsafes no kind of an answer. The choice in fact merely amounted to that between being âinâ or âoutâ (in any sense), and now that the severity of the winter had abated, Alice much preferred the solitude of the garden to the vacancy of the house.
With rain came an extraordinary beauty to the narrow garden â its trees drenched, refreshed, and glittering at break of evening, its early flowers stooping pale above the darkened earth, the birds that haunted there singing as if out of a cool and happy cloister â the stormcock wildly jubilant. There was one particular thrush on one particular tree which you might say all but yelled messages at Alice, messages which sometimes made her laugh, and sometimes almost ready to cry, with delight.
And yet ever the same vague influence seemed to haunt her young mind. Scarcely so much as a mood; nothing in the nature of a thought; merely an influence â like that of some impressive stranger met â in a dream, say â long ago, and now half-forgotten.
This may have been in part because the low and foundering wall between the empty meadows and her own recess of greenery had always seemed to her like the boundary between two worlds. On the one side freedom, the wild; on this, Miss Lennox, and a sort of captivity. There Reality; here (her âdutiesâ almost forgotten) the confines of a kind of waking dream. For this reason, if for no other, she at the same time longed for and yet in a way dreaded the afternoonâs regular reprieve.
It had proved, too, both a comfort and a vexation that the old servant belonging to the new family next door had speedily discovered this little habit, and would as often as not lie in wait for her between a bush of lilac and a bright green chestnut that stood up like a dense umbrella midway along the wall that divided Miss Lennoxâs from its one neighbouring garden. And since apparently it was Aliceâs destiny in life to be always precariously balanced between extremes, Sarah had also turned out to be a creature of rather peculiar oscillations of temperament.
Their clandestine talks were, therefore, though frequent, seldom particularly enlightening. None the less, merely to see this slovenly ponderous woman enter the garden, self-centred, with a kind of dull arrogance, her louring face as vacant as contempt of the Universe could make it, was an event ever eagerly, though at times vexatiously, looked for, and
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