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

grass, I am. Not that if I were that old mealy-smilin’ bag of bones flat on her back on her bed up there with her bits of beadwork and slops through a spout, I wouldn’t make sure over-night of not being waked next mornin’. There’s something in me that won’t let me rest, what they call a volcano, though no more to eat in that beetle cupboard of a kitchen than would keep a Tom Cat from the mange.’
    â€˜But, Sarah,’ said Alice, casting a glance up at the curtained windows of the other house, ‘she looks such a quiet, patient old thing. I don’t think I could stand having not even enough to eat. Why do you stay?’
    Sarah laughed for a full half-minute in silence, staring at Alice meanwhile. ‘“Patient”!’ she replied at last, ‘Oo-ay. Nor to my knowledge did I ever breathe the contrary. As for staying; you’d stay all right if that loveyer of yours come along. You’d stand anything – them pale narrow-chested kind; though me, I’m neether to bend nor break. And if the old man was to look down out of the blue up there this very minute, ay, and shake his fist at me, I’d say it to his face. I loathe your whining psalm-singers. A trap’s a trap. You wait and see!’
    â€˜But how do you mean?’ Alice said slowly, her face stooping.
    There came no answer. And, on turning, she was surprised to see the bunchy alpaca-clad woman already disappearing round the corner of the house.
    The talk softly subsided in her mind like the dust in an empty room. Alice wandered on in the garden, extremely loth to go in. And gradually a curious happiness at last descended upon her heart, like a cloud of morning dew in a dell of wild flowers. It seemed in moments like these, as if she had been given the power to think – or rather to be conscious, as it were, of thoughts not her own – thoughts like vivid pictures, following one upon another with extraordinary rapidity and brightness through her mind. As if, indeed, thoughts could be like fragments of glass, reflecting light at their every edge and angle. She stood tiptoe at the meadow wall and gazed greedily into the green fields, and across to the pollard aspens by the waterside. Turning, her eyes recognized clear in the shadow and blue-grey air of the garden her solitude – its solitude. And at once all thinking ceased.
    â€˜The Spirit is me : I haunt this place!’ she said aloud, with sudden assurance, and almost in Sarah’s own words. ‘And I don’t mind – not the least bit. It can be only my thankful, thankful self that is here. And that can never be lost.
    She returned to the house, and seemed as she moved to see – almost as if she were looking down out of the sky on herself – her own dwarf figure walking beneath the trees. Yet there was at the same time a curious individuality in the common things, living and inanimate, that were peeping at her out of their secrecy. The silence hung above them as apparent as their own clear reflected colours above the brief Spring flowers. But when she stood tidying herself for the usual hour of reading to Miss Lennox, she was conscious of an almost unendurable weariness.
    That night Alice set to work with her needle upon a piece of sprigged muslin to make her ‘watch-gown’ as Sarah called it. She was excited. She hadn’t much time, she fancied. It was like hiding in a story. She worked with extreme pains, and quickly. And not till the whole flimsy thing was finished did she try on or admire any part of it. But, at last, in the early evening of one of the middle days of April, she drew her bedroom blind up close to the ceiling, to view herself in her yellow grained looking-glass.
    The gown, white as milk in the low sunlight, and sprinkled with even whiter embroidered nosegays of daisies, seemed to attenuate a girlish figure, already very slender. She had arranged her abundant hair with unusual care, and