Short Stories 1927-1956 by Walter de la Mare Page A

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    The 2.17 p.m. this lovely, sleepy, precocious afternoon left only one passenger behind it on the wooden platform of the minute country station of Ashenham. Its volumes of vapour went ballooning up under the immense blue dome of the heavens; its nearly empty compartments rolled by; it was gone. And lo, Ronnie Forbes. With a short-sighted but observant glance at his rural whereabouts he stuffed his French novel into his pocket, gave up his ticket, passed through the booking-office and looked round for a cab. Here, however, the only signs of life were an empty farm-wagon, a gaudy red and yellow reaping machine, and a bevy of sparrows engaged in a dust bath.
    He turned back, and with that bland air of assurance which sets its possessor at ease in any company, he enquired of the porter if he knew of a house called Willows. The porter was so old and so old-fashioned that he touched his hat when he replied. He knew Willows well. Mrs Cotton’s house. And he gave Ronnie copious and reiterated directions how to get there. It lay about two-and-a-half miles distant. You turned to the left at the signpost after passing the Green Man, took the third turning on the right – a little before you reached the old windmill – and went straight on until you came to a little old stone bridge over a stream. And there you were. Why, yes, there was a fly, and it could be fetched from the village – and that was a mile or so in the other direction. But it was an easy walk if you liked walking ;‘And you can’t miss it, sir,’ he repeated again and again. It was as though here was an ardent pilgrim, and there, Mecca. Ronnie didn’t quite see himself descending on his prey in lonely grandeur in the village cab, and he had plenty of time. He waived the suggestion, and at once set out.
    No rain seemed to have refreshed the white dusty road for months past; indeed, on a chalky soil even a plenteous fall of dew vanishes into thin air when once the morning sun is up. But the meadows beyond the leafy hedgerow on the one side were as gay as a picture, and the dark acres of ploughland on the other were already sheened over with the first blades of sprouting corn. Sophisticated and urban creature though he looked amid this rural scene, Ronnie went on his way rejoicing.
    Nor did his footsteps flag until he had passed the rather tumbledown Green Man and the incredibly old traditional broadside gaffer in gaiters who sat with his beard and his blue-and-white mug on a bench under its motionless sign. Still, it was warm work, and as soon as a gateway showed, Ronnie came to a standstill and took off his hat. He leant both arms on the gate and looked over and in. The pasture in front of him rose in a smooth wide curve of the embosoming earth against the pure blue of the sky, and there in the tender sunshine stood browsing sedate old mother ewes, while others, no less stolidly maternal of aspect, sat motionless in the lush young grass. How human, and how stupid, they looked, thought Ronnie: and how engaging!
    And round about these sober dames was a host of long-legged lambs, their small inquisitive faces all turned in his direction, with sudden tremors of dangling flat woolly tails, and zigzagleapings and skippings aside in full butt of their mothers’ dugs. What adorable country! And the woods over there, a faint purple with their bare twigs, though a few were now full in their virgin young leaf! Larks, too – it was impossible to say how many. It was as though each one of them had its own spiral pitch in the blue, and had only to range that airy and invisible tower to keep its walls for ever echoing with song.
    Ronnie took a deep breath: it was little short of absurd – the combination of such a day and such an errand! Nonetheless he had made pretty certain of fine weather before setting out. For he hadn’t the faintest notion what kind of house and what kind of people were awaiting him. They might be perfectly awful, quite too impossible. Imagine that