Walter de la Mare
The Stories of Walter de la Mare (Part 2), continued from HERE
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous reviews of older or classic fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
A RECLUSE
“We talked of Chance and Dreams…”
One of the great ghost stories of all time, of course. One that debates within its two main characters the nature or truth of ghosts themselves. One that is also important to the foregoing review of these WDLM stories and indeed of many others, including Aickman’s. As a couple of preliminary asides, A RECLUSE has the most important moment yet for my Zeno quest of recent years: “…his watch, a gold half-hunter, its engraving almost worn away with long service – […] …as if the last ten minutes had added years to his age.” (My bold). And the ‘slopbasin solipsism’ I have noted heretofore in this current review: “I washed my hands in S.S.C.’s basin,…[…] …one’s brain-pan might as well be a basin of soap-bubbles.” And not finding the bathroom when our narrator finally goes to bed! How did his bladder last out to dawn?
‘the best things in life are to be found at its edges’?
Please let me (as the narrator) add notes and quotes for this story’s whole literary life-changing journey…
My visit to Mr Bloom’s Montrésor, a house found not by chance but by the tiny bubble-car of destiny, voluntary without knowing why, losing my car key (or having had it stolen by a stout and almost coquettish Mr Bloom in his clothes that were too big and ‘indoor boots’ with ‘imitation laces’: “He stooped round at me – the loose, copious creature – and was almost flirtatious. […] What made him so extortionately substantial, and yet in effect, so elusive and unreal?” — thus I’m induced to stay overnight to listen to him about ‘the occult’ and about his now dead secretary Steve or SSC, and my suddenly meeting his yellowish dog Chunks, and I recall, in this context, my own younger experience with the planchette via a Miss Algood who is good enough for her not to be upset, even posthumously!
The car journey there, you ask? Well, after visiting a sick friend and returning by a different route, what, I equally ask, of the horseman and the cardboard box he carried as if by short cut before I arrived at the house? “I put him in only because he put himself in.” This accentuates the impulsiveness of fate. “‘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.” It is almost like the journey made in H.R. Wakefield’s Blind Man’s Buff: here in ‘A Recluse’: “…the eyelids descended over his eyes…”, those same eyelids from ALL HALLOWS’?
“The evening light swam softly in through the uncurtained windows as if upon the stillness of a dream.”
Mr Bloom, as if ‘picnicking’ downstairs: “…beautiful, costly things in themselves, but, in this hugger-mugger, robbed of all elegance and grace.[…] …books had been removed and lay stacked up in portable bundles”. Hugger-mugger as WDLM often puts it. ‘A Slough of Despond.’ Kept up past midnight by Mr Bloom’s offer of alcohol. And the events at dawn that I will not detail here, but merely say that they form an explicit infestation by a haunting that horror elsewhere cannot match, a frisson of ‘waxen’, ‘soap-like’ enormity. If frissons can be such! My own face ‘went out’ at it.
“…every other mouthful of air we breathe must have been somebody’s last.”
“…the ink was smudged and had left its ghost on the blank page opposite it.”
“– a stopped clock, a dried-up inkwell,…”
Another Visitor from Porlock visiting a recluse in WDLM!
But here the visitor is welcome?
A:B:O
“Rats crowd in the walls, I often hear their tumult. Come, sup with me.”
A narration by a man affectionately nicknamed Rattie by his complicit friend. This is horror and a half. And half again, half again, a growing horror forever. This narration’s title (and the whole word these letters are short of) must be seen, at least partly, in the abject ‘light’ of the veiled Anti-Natalism perceived earlier by this review above and beyond… “And sin is in the air – child of disease and death and springing-up and hatred of life.”
But it is even worse than that! This narration strives from outset to subvert the horror in its inevitable path, by doubling the half, as if a whole of something would be a final exorcism of that something. This being in tune with the boy at the beginning, a whistler or ‘siffleur’ (he whistles the Marseillaise here in the WDLM), a boy who, I recently noted in the famous OH WHISTLE story (reviewed here), had his sixpence gratuitously doubled to a shilling — in this WDLM “He doubled his fist on the sixpence.” [Someone called Theresa Whistler is mentioned in a footnote to this story in this book.] And we also have this so-called proverb: “Well, what is a five pound note in one’s pocket to a sixpence discovered in a gutter?” And later Rattie twice explicitly doubled a five pound note tip to someone to ‘come sit and sup’ with him and thus, by company, try to safeguard his soul from the horror.
“(I slowly counted each sounding ‘cluck’ of my clock)”
I could try to itemise this horror for you, the nature of how and what was dug up from his complicit friend’s garden, something attached by a metal pipe to a yew tree, why a rectangular shape floated on his retina, the Welsh lamb bone being gnawed, the nature of the invasive entity, and much more. But nothing would serve to convey the sheer horror and foulness of this story, not even by quoting: “This was a dim skulking horror of soul and an inhuman depravity. It is impossible for me to tell of my horrid strivings of brain.” That is mere wordage. The horror of this story is beyond its words. No exaggeration. I will, though, additionally mention, merely as an aside, the significant explicit ‘elbow’-trigger (“my elbow was pressed against his arm”) that sort of announces the first appearance of the aforementioned entity. ABO, Elbow, too, as assonant?
I shall just join in saying, along with this narration: “And if this be not our lot we must exist but to hide our discovery from the eyes of the sane.” That should include the discovery of this narration itself, too. Don’t dig it up. But, on the other hand, literature needs reading, needs being doubled-down upon.
THE TREE
How can I go on? Story after story, whether read before or not, staggering in their dark beauty. This is possibly the most powerful story so far in my current reading and re-reading spate of WDLM, and that is saying increasingly half and half and half more than I can express in this real-time review. Each sentence of the story is priceless, and temptingly quotable, but so utterly quotable it somehow seems to become unquotable. So I have restricted myself to just one quote below, possibly one of the least quotable in the whole story, the one concerning ‘semi-fraternal’ truths…
“To submit to being half-starved simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look at your bits of drawings; to sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in your back-garden, twenty times more useless because there wasn’t its like for miles around, even if there wasn’t; to be content to hang like a bloodsucker on the generosity of a relative half-blood and half-water – well, he had given P.P. a bit of his mind.”
POSSIBLE SPOILERS TO OR BY THE BARK AND BRANCHES OF THIS REVIEW’S TREE, AND THE DARKLY STRANGE AND TANTALISINGLY BEAUTIFUL BIRDLIFE (AND BEAUTIFUL, PERHAPS POISONOUS, FLOWERS, FRUIT OR WHATEVER) THAT IT HARBOURS:
This is is the story of the rich Fruit Merchant returning by dreary and surprisingly downtrodden first-class train carriage and by horse carriage manned by a sort of animal human, through hoar-frost and country wilds to see his half-brother whom he somehow makes us refer to as P.P., also remembering when they first met 12 years before. They have since had disputes over money, as well as their ongoing natural mutual antipathy, and when you read the descriptions, you understand why, at least from the Fruit Merchant’s point of view — but in some sort of button-focussed OCD way, the Fruit Merchant needs to harvest a principle as well as a principal, to reclaim a monetary debt that P.P. owes him, even though the Fruit Merchant does not need the money.
We gradually learn of the giant tree whence P.P. makes valuable woodcuts and drawings, or as our Fruit Merchant deems them, ‘miserable scribblings and scragglings.’ And the tree is the one that grew huge as if from nothing, like magic, in the two half-brothers’ inherited land, though I may be wrong about that last bit, as, after putting down this story, one feels one needs to destroy any memory of it just as P.P. must have tried to do with the tree itself by a lethally cut tree-ring in it, and also as the Fruit Merchant later destroys, in turn, each of P.P.’s priceless auctioned woodcuts and drawings that, as a rich Fruit Merchant, he can easily afford to buy, thus to destroy them. But I can write no more about it in real-time, and I somehow do not wish to refresh anything by browsing the story again.
PS: Memory of the tree in The Tree has so far remained indelible.
PPS: Ditto
My front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/14/the-tree-by-walter-de-la-mare/
Do two half-brothers make a single whole one?
THE GREEN ROOM
“‘I fancied these books were all the books you had.’ He glanced over the dingy hugger-mugger of second-hand literature that filled the shelves and littered the floor —“
This story — about Alan who is invited to a bookshop’s backroom ‘parlour’ with more special books — is a rhapsody about a ghost he meets there. It is exquisitely peaceful and thoughtful accompanying the near-silent lying in-state stream on TV as I read it….
“The young woman in the photograph had made, if any, a more feeble attempt to conceal her secret sorrows than a pall to conceal its bier or a broken sepulchre its bones.”
But it could have become the most perfect ghost story ever written had its second half been foreshortened, dare I say, aborted, in the ghostly light of the inferred young woman’s suicide behind it, and shorn of arguably confused items of verse and literary references, and even, for me, an inexplicable reference to a ‘Jew’ and feminine issues of modern political incorrectness regarding Mrs E, the bookseller’s wife.
The blurred pencil of the exercise book itself, the letters E.F., made me think in WLDM’s prophetic point of view of E.R., slightly rubbed out, until I saw the letters had also been woodcut… or even a blend of E.R.’s death with her prior daughter-in-law’s?
A nemonymity of publication thus ensuing as a legacy Alan needed to create, without thought of profit. He himself even becomes — in tune with a common WDLM theme — one with the ghost herself in her shocking coquettish, ostrich-feathers phase, thus neutralising the calmness of her earlier beauty and evocative haunting quality —“Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously bitter?”
Whatever the case, the first half of this work is sublime, unmissable, needing its live wires clamped somewhere halfway through, “The past hung like cobwebs in the air”, amidst atmospheric book-hunting in a rambling house, with a floating ghostly face, and even a sort of male ‘Visitor from Porlock’ to Alan in the backroom, a visitor who later recurs. There are even two telling ‘elbow’ moments that enhance. “It was as though unseen fingers had tugged at a wire – with no bell at the end of it.”, out of some spectral deep.
“‘Once young,’ they cry, ‘now carked with care!’ […] ‘It is your silence, like a cankering rust, That I am perishing of.’”
Yet… “He stared back with a face as blank as a turnip.”
And then I, in my own real-time review, think again of today’s silent bier alone with silent millions around it:
“I wish – I pray – you poor thing, you could only be a little more at peace – whoever, wherever you are – whatever I am.’”
“No rue? No myrrh? No nightshade?
Oh, Tremble not, spirit! All is well.”
“Why nothing now, but lonely sit,
And over-read what have I writ.”
The Orgy: An Idyll
“What in the chronic sirocco of his next world would be the use to him of a mere half-guinea’s worth of cooling breezes? Scarcely a sop in the pan.”
From sirocco to deluge. The orgy of objects. And an idyll of the idiot. A comic masterpiece that would surely be regularly printed over the decades in best ever story anthologies of a general literary nature if WDLM were not seen to be fiction’s treasure trove for only ghost story and darkly whimsical fantasy lovers only. Published in 1931, it presents, in a breathtaking prose, a cornucopia of opulent objects, viz. furniture, musical instruments, culinary specialities, ornaments, native craftwork, indeed an endless congeries of curiosities of increasing value, to the nth degree, in a large London department store. Through the eyes of handsome but thick Philip Pim, once banker’s clerk and currently heir to his extremely rich uncle’s India-made money, but Philip not being able to add up, finds a windfall gold sovereign, and now to be disinherited by his uncle, he tries to get his own back on him by buying up the department store’s goods on the back of the bank account that his uncle used in the store, if not by dint of Philip’s sovereign alone!
I cannot possibly do justice to the panoply and array of this work from the mere mention of “hippopotamus-hoof inkstands” to, later, “The ink, as you see, sir, cannot possibly leak from the bottle, if the case, that is, is held the right way up – so. The pencil, the ‘Sans Merci’, as you observe, is of solid gold; and the pen, though we cannot guarantee the nib, is set with life-size turquoises.” And that is a mere gewgaw amidst what I have just lived through via WDLM’s words. But I must mention, capriciously, a calendar “telling the day of the week of any day of the month in any year in any century from one A.D. to nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine.” And a harp that was owned by, inter alios, Mozart, Brahms and Schumann, the strings of which harping I later linked to the store asking for a donation from his rich uncle to the charity for poor shopkeepers!
And two classic ‘elbow’ moments, the first of a dawning thought by Philip of R-O-Mance… “Have you,’ he inquired almost timidly at last, his eyes fixed on a chastely printed list of cutlery and silver ware that lay on the glass case at his elbow, ‘have you just one really simple, lovely, rare, precious, and, well, unique little trinket suitable for a lady? Young, you know? An un-birthday present?’”
But the best elbow moment I imagine in the whole of literature is the one where Philip first senses his own come-uppance! — “…when a small but clearly actual little voice at Philip’s elbow suddenly shrilled up into his ear —‘Mr Philip Pim, sir?’ At echo of this summons Philip stood stock-still and stiff, his heart in his ears.”
But this work is not without an oblique nod to WDLM’s ghost stories, if not Proust… “Years before he had often tried the same device when as a small boy deadly afraid of the dark he had managed at last to thrust his fevered head up and out from under his bedclothes, and to emit a dreadful simulacrum of a croupy cough. He had never known it to fail of effect, and it was always nice to know his mother was there.”
And a finale of imputed verse without rhyme and the purchase with the sovereign of an umbrella in a veritable Noah’s Ark of a deluge! That glimpse of truth.
THE ALMOND TREE
“…I was very fond of Yorkshire pudding, ‘from under the meat, you know’.”
There is only one fleeting mention of the eponymous tree in this semi-Proustian tale, not a ghost or supernatural story as such, but one with a snowy backdrop to idyllic countrified ideals of fairies within dreams and even an equally fleeting mention of Pan (“very soon dream stalked in, mingling with reality”) and a boy (now a man called ‘the Count’ telling this story to a friend about his childhood and his parents’ dysfunctional marriage and the frequent absences of his father to play cards with Mr Grey and his father’s friendship with Jane Grey, the man’s sister — and the boy’s own friendship with Jane: ”’I love fourpence, pretty little fourpence, I love fourpence better than my life,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘But that’s a secret,’ she added, glancing up over her shoulder. She kissed lightly the top of my head.”) … a boy who, ironically unlike Proust, lost his mother’s goodnight kisses because of the marital dysfunction. Idyllic and depressing by turn, I wonder who Martha Rodd is! Was she the boy’s would-be governess or a supposed housemaid or even the father’s secret love, and not Miss Grey being his secret love, the latter’s own unrequited love being shown when she secretly visited, with the boy’s collusion, the coffin of the father after he had died in the snow? Yes, Martha Rodd, whose belly did not show itself to the boy somehow, who may have provided the meat under the pudding, that baby’s cry at the end? Later palmed off as the boy’s brother? Yes, Martha Rodd who is she? The answer may be in the title. You see, ‘the best-known reference to the almond is Aaron’s rod that budded (Numbers 17). This is miraculous because the flowering, budding, and fruiting of the almond in nature are always separated in time’ — as I have just discovered on the internet (my bold).
***
A sad story of Proust and tea, and the father, in the light of the mother’s instinctive cold-heartedness, is the sympathetic figure, despite most readers leaning the other way, I guess. I found this very sad, when the father said this: “One by one our hopes come home to roost, our delusions find themselves out, and the mystery proves to be nothing but sleight-of-hand. It’s age, my dear Jane – age; it turns one to stone. With you young people life’s a dream;” and sad, too: “My mother was kneeling on the rug by the fireside. She looked very small, even dwarfish, I thought. She was gazing into the flames; one shoe curved beneath the hem of her gown, her chin resting on her hand.” And a lesson for us today about ‘talk’ and its “pinch of truth in a hogshead of falsehood.”
cf the meat under the pudding with A:B:O.
the fresh guess, the hale and hearty hypothesis
WILLOWS
“; this thesis craze. But data at second hand, was that really quite proper? Ronnie was still dubious. Surely any young zealot bent on a thesis should conduct his own investigations, should himself play sexton to his dead and buried subject, and with his own privy paw, dig it up again. It was the least one would expect of him.”
This is another writerly conte à clef to be factored into and from my review above about DISILLUSIONED. A man called Ronnie commissioned by his friend in America to help ditch the ‘death in Trinidad’ theory and other shallow naiveties by a callow critic about an obscure or cult poet, thus for Ronnie to find evidence in the house where the poet used to live, a house in the idyllic Spring countryside, and so to demolish that callow critic’s guessed hypothesis — such a guess or thesis that also needs ironically to be seen in the light of my fortuitous review yesterday (HERE) of E.F. Benson’s ‘The Outcast’. Strange, oblique synchronicities.
But how can the assumed freehold author who writes about this willowy kind of off-the-beaten track place that delights the reader be called “Blake-like”? Despite the later references to ‘Jerusalem’, I do not now know who to believe and whether the three characters in the house created by the author were ghosts, hence the priceless but clumsy last poem handed to Ronnie by Tweedledum being posted back to the house itself and thus lost as evidence!
It also made me doubt my own reliability as critic, with there being criticisms in this of the Intentional Fallacy thesis that I have long followed! And there are prophetic references, too, to the writerly ‘sillies’ today with their petty conversations and rivalries, then in newspapers, now on Twitter and Facebook!
Let me give you a short cut below through this satisfyingly adept and intriguing work, page-turning in its own right, in case you don’t want to read it, after my reference to conte à clef above …..as Ronnie meets the poet’s mother (“shoulders squared above her fortified bosom”) in a new Green Room, ‘a study in shades of green’, including cucumber, later meeting his widow, and then Tweedledum himself…
The mother, I guess, is the true creative artist embodied in the prolonged words given to her to speak by the author, the others, including Ronnie, merely unreliable hangers-on like me. Me and my own literary gestalt religion (“I had realized that to some minds and to some spirits poetry is what religion is to others – the most precious, the most certain, the most wanted thing life has to give.”) Trinity not Trinidad! And the vanity press, too, as arranged by the mother!
“…why not have said Tobago – which has at least a pleasing suggestion of tapioca. But Trinidad! Those dreadful d’s – like the slabs of a sarcophagus.”
“He had enjoyed his country walk. Here was the house. Let sleeping poets lie. He would have done his duty, and theses might go to the devil.”
“Nowadays one has only to write a book, it seems, to make even one’s kitchen cat an animal worth adorning a newspaper with. […] But then, I suppose, there have always been a few talkative sillies in the world who completely underestimate the common-sense of people in general. […] …there is a danger worse than death to this ‘very beauty’, and that it comes, not from the enemies, but from these so-called ‘lovers’ of poetry – these parasites – their jealousies, their quarrels, their pretences, their petty curiosity, their suffocating silliness.”
“But how can one separate entirely a man from his work, and especially if the one is, as it were, explanatory of the other?”
“But at this moment, though he had been conscious of no interruption, the door behind him seemed to have opened, for the two ladies had simultaneously raised and fixed their eyes on something or somebody behind him and out of his view.”
“…the leafy willows by the water’s brim stood as if enchanted in an ocean of light and colour, and the air resounded with a mellay of song so wild and vehement that the birds that uttered it seemed to have been seized with an anguish of fear lest the dark to come should deprive them of every hope of ever singing again.”
***
With my review of ‘The Almond Tree’ above, I discovered the intrinsic meaning of this tree within its plot. Here aspects of willows, when factored into this work named after them, seem manifold and telling, e.g. https://tree2mydoor.com/pages/information-trees-celtic-tree-calendar-willow-tree-symbolism
THE CARTOUCHE
Many of us have learnt the word ‘catafalque’ in the last few days, and I even mentioned, in passing, the lying-in-state (about ‘The Green Room’ above), and just as the lying-in-state was coming to an end an hour or so ago in my own real- time of this momentous day, I was reading this story by chance, with the same chance ‘impulse’ that Mr Millington on his way home to his wife had in leaving a train, at an unexpected stop, a place called Ebbingham, and alighting to see his zigzag-thinking friend Louis who may not have been at home, but he was at home, and this is about the dream Mr Millington had at night when there alone in the guest room’s four-poster …. and this makes me think how rampant synchronicity truly does work, especially when gestalt real-time reviewing such writers as Walter de la Mare….
“….thought itself might conceivably become audible.”
Mrs Millington thinks this thought upon her husband’s return, as she looks at him in the room where they both sit, she sewing. He had been missing all night, without a telephone message (the telephone wasn’t working at Louis’ place)… they are a married couple like those in I DIDN’T WANT TO MEAN YOU SAD that I happened to post on-line (HERE) a few days ago in honour of what is happening around us in Britain, its culmination today, and they are, I sense, themselves the original young couple in love whom Mr Millington remembers effectively breaking up without actually breaking up, to become the married couple who have, as a marital rapprochment today, just ‘re-met’ as result of his dream when in the four-poster bed at Louis’s place with the rain-leak stain on the ceiling that either caused the cartouche in the dream or was caused by the dream…. and what a dream! Let me take you through some of what ‘takes place’ within a conversation between the previously estranged married couple in an impending thunderstorm that never comes. Any ‘dream-tree’ or ‘indelible mark’ left by a ghost on inanimate objects, notwithstanding. (Any bold below is mine.)
“And – but there, my dear, what a disastrous thing it would be if the power were suddenly conferred on us to share one another’s thoughts – without any words, I mean.”
“Nonetheless there was again that feeling of something definite coming and yet failing to come. As when one wants to sneeze, and can’t.”
“Louis has ‘taste’ enough to run an ‘antique’ furnishing shop. And yet he lets his roof leak.”
“I had dreamt that I was lying face upwards on a very low bed, immured in the deep, dark, stony bowels of a pyramid, but without the least knowledge of how I had managed to get there, and convinced that there was no way out – not even by the way by which I must have come in. ‘I was terrified, and in acute distress. In the faint, dusky light, I could see that there was a very fine sand on the floor, and a few old broken or derelict relics of objects which I couldn’t distinguish – sacred furniture and images, I suppose. The place appeared to have been rifled; but there was no trace, as far as I can recall, of any sarcophagus or of any mummy, although some sort of both presumably there must once have been. Was I the mummy?”
“The characters in the cartouche resembled, left to right, first a crouching animal with a child’s face; tiny, I surmise, of course, but greatly dream-magnified. It was also very lovely. Next, there was a tree – a willow or weeping ash, something of that kind; and next to that, and partly under it, stood what appeared to be a box or chest or tomb with a rounded top – of the shape of a sarcophagus but much smaller. There was even a sort of sullen glitter from the precious stones with which it had been inlaid – although, as I say, this was only a representation of it. I realized that it had once contained the vital parts of some inmate, the heart, viscera and so forth; but that now it was empty. The astonishing thing is that I knew in my dream perfectly well what all these emblems stood for and what they signified. A desperate cankering grief for one thing – the weeping willow. An inward descent towards death. It was as if the past had resolved itself into this tiny esoteric pattern and that I could grasp it in an instant of time,… […] I took it to be a sort of personal and private message or communication, it must merely have referred of course to the unhappy fate, the destiny – who knows what? – of the poor creature, the mummy that had been interred there, in its stony sepulchre.”
“‘Well, all old beds – and Louis’s also – unless, which is quite possible, it is a fake, is Elizabethan – all old beds must not only have had scores of nocturnal occupants, but must have witnessed many uneasy, wakeful, miserable and possibly even tragic nights.”
”It was now no more than a lozenge-shaped blur which you could, if you wished, turn either into a catafalque with mourning plumes complete, or into some bower of delight out of the Faerie Queene…”
“For some minutes Mrs Millington had been sitting, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees,…”
I shall now delay this real-time review of WDLM’s stories while I review this…
CREWE
“He told me himself that he had remembered me in his will – ‘if still in his service’. You know how these lawyers put it. As a matter of fact he had given me to understand that if in the meantime for any reason any of us went elsewhere, the one left was to have the lot.”
The Crewe railway waiting-room too, ominous enough to have been built by a bad man for waiting in… This story is arguably, I feel, about what you call a Tontine (please see quote about this would-be Tontine above), and one needs to wait a long time normally for the results of this legal technicality to pan out, if the lawyers allow it to pan out at all, perhaps out of spite or simply jaundiced Jarndyce? So it seems appropriate that this is a story told in a waiting-room by the man who had been waiting for this form of Tontine to resolve. A story told in Crewe station about a non-stationary scarecrow!
And a solid or a substance become a mite, and a mite then become a mighty revenge by a ghost of a man who survived cremation after his suicide, if I recall correctly. A suicide caused by his losing the Tontine by being sacked for drinking too much. The story told by Mr Blake, and the Listener repeats verbatim for us what Blake said, a garrulous man who needs to speak to a stranger like us and in order to speak freely, and he also needs to speak simply to waive his waiting loneliness in such a solid place for waiting, but his description of the Reverend in a large house as solidly ominous as the waiting-room, whose drunken gardener of much harvestable fruits and crops was one participating in the Tontine till sacked, and Blake another servant to the Tontine, as is also young George, and they were the ones who got the gardener into trouble with the Reverend over his drinking and thus the curse starts and the curse makes the speech full of queerly oblique hints of terrifyingly disarming strangeness as Aickman might have later put into Blake’s garbled mouth, hints rather than solidity. And we sense the scarecrow is part of Blake’s waiting process, Zeno-slow, that comes perhaps half nearer, then half of that half, ever nearer forever. And still is, and Blake has come here to wait, within the disarming solidity of wooden benches. Creepily ungraspable.
But what of the Hesper, a ship about which those train passengers who had earlier been in the Crewe waiting-room were talking (there were many such ships called Tontine, too, I find.) And was this Hesper aka the Hesperus, i.e. the one that had a solid iron hull? And what of each ship’s crew now?
I somehow sense the scarecrow crew….
“And the night-jars croaking too.”
Having just read CREWE by Walter de la Mare, I feel it is blended with a sense of a future Robert Aickman and the type of Mrs Maple voice of a past M.R. James.
THE VATS
A brief story in words that somehow mean more and more the less and less they are read. The ultimate perhaps is never to read this work at all and depend on osmosis as solely generated by this review.
A story with characters deployed by one of them as narrator. Two “clock-vexed men” discussing the nature of time itself, and walking upon an unearthly terrain that started off as idyllic England — not that they are in a SF vision, but inside one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, the reader needing to be no more nor less than “half-woken” enough to continue sensing a half-meaning that ever promises more.
A number of vast vats placed monumentally upon some morphed Salisbury Plain, with Time tantamount to the water in the vats, and we can dive in and out, with cross-references to the Bible and to whatever else the reading mind conjures up as its occult source.
It is full of “hugger-mugger, feverish, precipitate” words that ever threaten over-spilling. A time-elongating story’s momentous, prophetic synergy with my reading of it. The second character, the narrator’s friend.
Cross-referenced THE VATS with THE RETURN here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/the-return-by-walter-de-la-mare/#comment-25532
This review continues here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/1005-2/