Free Short Stories 1895-1926 by Walter de la Mare Page A

clarity of the air discernible in the garden at times. The clearness as it were of glass, of a looking-glass, which conceals all behind and beyond it, returning only the looker’s wonder, or simply her vanity, or even her gaiety. Why, for the matter of that, thought Alice smiling, there are people who look into looking-glasses, actually see themselves there, and yet never turn a hair.
    There wasn’t any glass, of course. Its sort of mirage sprang only out of the desire of her eyes, out of a restless hunger of the mind – just to possess her soul in patience till the first favourable May evening came along and then once and for all to set everything at rest. It was a thought which fascinated her so completely, that it influenced her habits, her words, her actions. She even began to long for the afternoon solely to be alone with it; and in the midst of the reverie it charmed into her mind, she would glance up as startled as a Dryad to see the ‘cook-general’s’ dark face fixing its still cold gaze on her from over the moss-greened wall. As for Miss Lennox, she became testier and more ‘rational’ than ever as she narrowly watched the day approaching when her need for a new companion would become extreme.
    Who, however, the lover might be, and where the trysting-place, was unknown even to Alice, though, maybe, not absolutely unsurmised by her, and with a kind of cunning perspicacity perceived only by Sarah.
    â€˜I see my old tales have tickled you up, Miss,’ she said one day, lifting her eyes from the clothes-line she was carrying to the girl’s alert and mobile face. ‘What they call old wives’ tales I fancy, too.’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t think so,’ Alice answered. ‘I can hardly tell, Sarah. I am only at peace here, I know that. I get out of bed at night to look down from the window and wish myself here. When I’m reading, just as if it were a painted illustration – in the book, you know – the scene of it all floats in between me and the print. Besides, I can do just what I like with it. In my mind, I mean. I just imagine; and there it all is. So you see I could not bear now to go away.’
    â€˜There’s no cause to worry your head about that,’ said the woman darkly, ‘and as for picking and choosing I never saw much of it for them that’s under of a thumb. Why, when I was young, I couldn’t have borne to live as I do now with just meself wandering to and fro. Muttering I catch meself, too. And, to be sure, surrounded in the air by shapes, and shadows, and noises, and winds, so as sometimes I can neither see nor hear. It’s true, God’s gospel, Miss – the body’s like a clump of wood, it’s that dull. And you can’t get t’other side, so to speak.’
    So lucid a portrayal of her own exact sensations astonished the girl. ‘Well, but what is it, what is it, Sarah?’
    Sarah strapped the air with the loose end of the clothes-line. ‘Part, Miss, the hauntin’ of the garden. Part as them black-jacketed clergymen would say, because we’s we. And part ’cos it’s all death the other side – all death.’
    She drew her head slowly in, her puffy cheeks glowed, her small black eyes gazed as fixedly and deadly as if they were anemones on a rock.
    The very fulness of her figure seemed to exaggerate her vehemence. She gloated – a heavy somnolent owl puffing its feathers. Alice drew back, swiftly glancing as she did so over her shoulder. The sunlight was liquid wan gold in the meadow, between the black tree-trunks. They lifted their cumbrous branches far above the brick human house, stooping their leafy twigs. A starling’s dark iridescence took her glance as he minced pertly in the coarse grass.
    â€˜I can’t quite see why you should think of death,’ Alice ventured to suggest.
    â€˜Me? Not me! Where I’m put, I stay. I’m like a stone in the