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_Visitors_ was written by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956),
and was included in his _Collected Stories for Children_ (1947).

Title: Collected Stories for Children -- Visitors
Author: Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
Date of first publication: 1947
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Faber & Faber, 1962 (reprint of 1957 edition)
Date first posted: 30 March 2008
Date last updated: 30 March 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #102

This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net



.
                                Visitors

by Walter de la Mare (from his _Collected Stories for Children_) [1947]


One of the very last things that Tom Nevis was to think about in this
world was a sight he had seen when he was a child of about ten. Years
and years were to pass by after that March morning; and at the last
Tom was far away from home and England in the heat and glare of the
tropics. Yet this one far-away memory floated up into his imagination
to rest there in its peace and strangeness as serenely as a planet
shining in its silver above the snows of remote hills. It had just
stayed on in the quiet depths of his mind--like the small insects that
may be seen imprisoned in lumps of amber, their wings still glistening
ages after they were used in flitting hither-thither in their world as
it was then.

Most human beings have little experiences similar to Tom's. But they
come more frequently to rather solitary people--people who enjoy being
alone, and who have daydreams. If they occur at other times, they may
leave little impression, because perhaps one is talking or laughing or
busy, working away at what has to be done, or perhaps reading or
thinking. And then they may pass unnoticed.

But Tom had always been a funny solitary creature. Even as a child he
enjoyed being alone. He would sit on a gate or a stile for an hour at
a time just staring idly into a field, following with his eyes the
shadows of the clouds as they swept silently over its greenness, or
the wandering wind, now here, now there, stooping upon the taller
weeds and grasses. It was a pleasure to him merely even to watch a cow
browsing her way among the buttercups, swinging the tuft of her tail
and occasionally rubbing her cinnamon-coloured shoulder with her soft
nose. It seemed to Tom at such times--though he never actually put
the feeling into words--almost as if the world were only in his mind;
almost as if it were the panorama of a dream.

So too Tom particularly enjoyed looking out of his window when the
moon was shining. Not only in winter when there is snow on the ground,
and clotting hoar-frost, but in May and summer too, the light the moon
sheds in her quiet rests on the trees and the grass and the fields
like a silver tissue. And she is for ever changing: now a crescent
slenderly shining--a loop of silver or copper wire in the western
after-glow of sunset; and now a mere ghost of herself, lingering in
the blue of morning like a lantern burning long after the party is
over which it was meant to make gay.

Tom was more likely to be left alone than most boys, owing to a fall
he had had when he was three. He had a nurse then, named Alice
Jenkins. One morning she sat him up as usual close to the nursery
table and his bowl of bread and milk; and had then turned round an
instant at the sound of something heard at the window. And he, in that
instant, to see perhaps what she was looking at, had jumped up in his
chair, the bar had slipped out, and he had fallen sprawling on to the
floor.

The fall had injured his left arm. And try as the doctors might, they
had never been able to make it grow like his right arm. It was lean
and shrunken and almost useless, and the fingers of the hand were
drawn up a little so that it could be used only for simple easy
things. He was very little good at games in consequence, and didn't
see much of other boys of his own age. Alice had cried half the night
after that miserable hour; but the two of them loved each other the
more dearly for it ever afterwards. Even now that she was married and
kept a small greengrocer's shop in a neighbouring town, Tom went to
see her whenever he could, and munched her apples and pears and talked
about everything under the sun.

This accident had happened so long ago that he had almost forgotten he
had ever at all had the full use of his arm. He grew as much
accustomed to its hanging limply from his shoulder as one may become
accustomed to having a crooked nose, prominent ears or a squint. And
though he realized that it kept him out of things like climbing trees
or playing such games as other boys could do with ease, though it had
made a kind of scarecrow of him, it was simply because of this that he
was left more to himself and his own devices than most boys. And
though he never confessed it to himself, and certainly not to anybody
else, he immensely enjoyed being in his own company. It was not a
bit--as it well might be--like being in an empty house, but rather in
an enchanted one; wherein you never knew what might not happen next,
even though everything was still and quiet--the sun at the windows,
the faint shadows in the corridors, the water in the green fishpond
and the tangled branches in the orchard.

Tom, too, beside being for this reason rather odd in his body--small
for his age, with narrow shoulders, a bony face, light grey-blue eyes
and a stiff shock of yellow hair standing up on his high head--was
also a little odd in mind. He was continually making up stories, even
when there was no one to listen to them. For his black-eyebrowed elder
sister very seldom had time to do so; and the nurse he had after Alice
was married had not much patience with such things. But he almost as
much enjoyed telling them to himself. And when his sister Emily died
he seemed to get into the habit of mooning and daydreaming more than
ever.

He had other queer little habits too. Whenever he went downstairs from
his bedroom--unless he was in a violent hurry or his father had called
him--he always sat down for a few moments on a narrow stair from which
he looked out from a tall landing window over the garden. It seemed to
him you could never tell what you might _not_ see at such a moment;
though as a matter of fact he never saw anything very unusual: just
the grass and the lawn and the currant-bushes and the monkey-puzzle;
perhaps a cat walking gingerly on its errand, and the usual thrushes
and blackbirds, tits and robins, and the light of the sun on the
red-brick wall. And what you don't actually see you cannot put a name
to.

Another fancy of his was, whenever he passed it, to stoop down and
peer through the keyhole of a cellar that spread out underneath the
old Parsonage. He might just as well have looked up a chimney for
there was even less light to be seen through the keyhole. And nothing
was stowed away in the cellar except a few old discarded pieces of
furniture, some bottles of wine, empty hampers, an old broken
rocking-horse and such things as that. None the less, whenever he
passed that door, Tom almost invariably stooped on his knees, puckered
up one eye and peered through its keyhole with the other, and smelt
the fusty smell.

There was no end to his cranky comicalities. Long ago, for example, he
had made a rule of always doing certain things on certain days. He
cared no more for washing in those early days than most boys: but he
always had a 'thorough good wash' on Fridays; even though it was 'bath
night' on Saturdays. He went certain walks on certain evenings, that
is, evenings after it had been raining, or maybe when some flower or
tree was just out. And he always went to see his sister Emily's grave
once a month.

She had died on the twelfth of April; and apart from her birthday, he
always kept her month day--all the twelfths throughout the year. If he
could, and if he had time, he would take a bunch of flowers along with
him, choosing those which Emily had liked the best or those he liked
the best, or both together. The churchyard was not far away, as the
crow flies, but it was yet another of his odd habits not to go there
direct--as if that might be too easy--but to go round by a meadow path
that was at least three-quarters of a mile further than the way by the
village lane.

Except when he happened to be by himself at evenings just after the
sun was set, Tom always felt more alone on these monthly journeys than
at any other time. And for as long a time as he could spare he would
sit on an old bench under the churchyard yew. At first he had been
exceedingly wretched and miserable on these visits. The whole
Parsonage, his father and his sister and the maids--it was just as if
a kind of thick cold mist had come over them all when Emily died.
Everything that was familiar in the house had suddenly stood up
strange and exclamatory, as if to remind them something was gone that
would never come back again. And though none of the others, of course,
really forgot what had happened, though he often actually noticed his
father desisting from what he was just about to say simply because he
could not bear the grief of mentioning Emily's name, as time went on,
things began to be much as ever again.

In the early days Tom's black-haired elder sister, Esther, used to
come with him to the churchyard now and then; but she soon had so many
things to think about and to amuse herself with that there was very
little time to spend with him. Besides, they agreed about nothing and
spent most of the time arguing and wrangling. So for a good many
months Tom had gone alone. He knew his own particular monthly walk to
the churchyard as well as he knew his own clothes or anything else in
the world. He never set out on it without wishing he could see his
sister Emily again, and he never came home again to the Parsonage
without thinking to himself that it was better perhaps he could _not_
bring her back. For he was somehow sure, wherever her body might be,
that she herself was perfectly happy, and, as it were, always to be
young. Now and then, indeed, it seemed as if some wraith of herself
had actually whispered this into his ear as he sat on his bench
looking out across the tombstones, and sometimes wondering how long it
would be before he was dead too. But then Tom's little moperies came
very near at times to being a little mad.

That was another odd thing about Tom. He enjoyed thinking and puzzling
over everything that came into his head, whereas most people will not
allow hard or disagreeable thoughts to stay in their minds. They drive
them out like strange dogs out of a garden, or wasps out of a sunny
room. Tom thought of them, however, in the most practical way
possible. He knew, for example, as much about grave-digging when he
was ten as the old sexton could tell him at sixty. The thought of the
bones beneath the turf did not frighten him a bit. Surely, he thought
to himself, nothing could be as ugly as all that if it were just the
truth. And if it was, why, then it _was_.

Not that he did not enjoy being alive in this world. He fairly ached
sometimes with delight in it. He had talked to Alice about it, and to
Emily too, sitting on a green bank in the sunshine or in the
hayfields, or by the banks of their secret pond in the woods. He loved
also to brood on what might happen to him in the future; though he
never had the faintest notion in those days that he was going to
travel, that he was going to leave England when he was still a young
man, for good and all, and never come back. He had no notion of that
at all until there came a talk one afternoon in her husband's shop
with his nurse Alice. After that he knew he had been born to be a
traveller in spite of his arm and his cranky meagre body. And what led
up to the talk was what happened to him that March morning as he came
back from his customary visit to the churchyard.

A faint but bleak east wind was blowing. Except for a light silvery
ridge of cloud in the south the sky was blue all over, and the
sunlight was as bright as if a huge crystal reflector behind it were
casting back its beams from the heavens upon the earth. A few
daffodils were out in the fields, and the celandine with its
shovel-shaped glossy leaves too; and the hedges were beginning to
quicken, looking from a distance as if a faint green mist hung over
them. The grass was already growing after its winter's rest, and the
birds of the countryside were busy flying hither and thither as if
time were something that melted in the sun. Instead of returning from
the churchyard to the house by the way he had come, Tom had turned in
through a wicket gate into a straggling wood of birch and hazel, and
so came out at the corner of a large meadow which lay over against the
Old Farm.

There had been heavy rains during the previous week, and as
Tom--absent-minded as ever--came edging along the path of the meadow,
he lifted his eyes and was astonished to see a pool of water in the
green hollow of the meadow beneath him, where none had lain before.
Its waters were evidently of the rains that had fallen in the past few
days. They stretched there grey and sparkling, glassing the sky, and
the budding trees which grew not far from their margin. And floating
upon this new wild water he saw two strange birds. Never had he seen
their like before, though he guessed they might be straying sea-birds.
They were white as snow, and were disporting themselves gently in this
chance pool, as if it were a haven of refuge or meeting-place which
they had been seeking from the first moment they had come out of their
shells.

Tom watched them, fixed motionless where he stood, afraid almost to
blink lest he should disturb their happy play. But at last he took
courage, and gradually, inch by inch, he approached stealthily nearer
until at last he could see their very eyes shining in their heads, and
the marvellous snow of their wings and their coral beaks reflected in
the shallow wind-rippled pool. They appeared to be companions of all
time. They preened their feathers, uttering faint cries as if of
delight, as if they were telling secrets one to the other. And now and
again they would desist from their preening and float there quietly
together on the surface of the water, in the silvery sunshine. And
still Tom continued to gaze at them with such greedy eagerness it was
a marvel this alone did not scare the wild creatures away. It seemed
to Tom as if he had been looking at them for ages and ages under the
huge shallow bowl of the March sky. He dreaded every instant they
would lift their wings and fly away. That would be as if something had
gone out of his own inmost self.

He was whispering too under his breath, as if to persuade them to
remain there always, and let there be no change. Indeed they might be
human creatures, they floated there on the water so naturally and
happily in their devotion to one another's company. And it seemed once
more to Tom as if the whole world and his own small life had floated
off into a dream, and that he had stood watching their movements and
their beauty for as many centuries as the huge oak that towered above
the farm had stood with outflung boughs, bearing its flowers and its
acorns from spring on to spring, and from autumn to autumn until this
very morning.

What was curious too, the two strange birds seemed at last to have no
fear of his being there, even though the bright shallow basin of rain
on which they rested in the meadow was not more than eleven paces
wide. They eyed him indeed with a curious sharp brightness, almost as
if they wished to be sharing their secret with him, one brought from
the remote haunts from which they had set out over-night; as if this
was the end of their journey. The drops they flung with their bills
over their snowy plumage gleamed like little balls of changing silver
or crystal, though not brighter than their eyes. The red of their
webbed feet showed vividly beneath the grey clear water. And the faint
soft cries uttered in their throats rather than with open bills were
not sweet or shrill as a peewit or a linnet singing, but were yet
wonderfully gentle and tender to listen to.

And Tom's odd mind slipped once more into a deep daydream as he stood
there--in his buttoned-up jacket, with his cap over his short springy
hair--in the light but bleak east wind that swept out of the clouds
across the meadow and the roof and chimneys of the old red-brick
farm.... In the middle of that night he woke up: as suddenly almost as
if a voice had called him. And the scene was still as sharp and fresh
in his imagination as if he were looking at it again spread out in
actuality in the morning light before his very eyes.

It was just like ridiculous Tom not to visit the meadow again for many
days afterwards. Once or twice he actually set out in that direction,
but turned off before the farmyard came into view. And when at last he
did go back again, towards evening, the whole scene had changed. No
longer was the wind from the east, but from the south. Lofty clouds
towered up into the intense blue of the sky, like snow-topped
mountains. The air was sweet with spring. The tight dark buds had
burst in the hedges into their first pale-green leaf; thrushes were
singing among the higher branches of the elms. But the pool of
rainwater had sunk out of sight in its hollow, had been carried up by
the wind and sun into the heavens, leaving only the greener and
fresher grass behind it. The birds were flown....

One day in the following July, Tom went off to see his old nurse,
Alice Hubbard. She had grown a good deal stouter after her marriage,
and Tom sat with her in the cramped parlour behind the shop, looking
out into the street across the bins of green peas and potatoes,
carrots and turnips, lettuces and cabbages and mint, the baskets of
gooseberries and currants and strawberries and the last cherries. And
while Alice was picking out for him a saucerful of strawberries, he
told her all about himself: what he had been doing and thinking, and
about the new maid, and about the Parsonage. And she would say as she
paused with finger and thumb over her basket, 'Lor, Master Tom!' or
'Did you ever, now, Master Tom!' or 'There now, Master Tom!' And all
of a sudden the memory of the pool of water and the two strange birds
flitted back into his mind and he fell silent. Alice put down before
him the saucer of strawberries, with a little blue-and-white jug of
cream, and she glanced a little curiously into his narrow, ugly face.

'And what might you be thinking of now, I wonder?' she said.

An old woman in a black bonnet and shawl who had been peering about at
the fruit from the pavement close to the window outside, at this
moment came into the shop, and Alice went out to serve her with what
she wanted. Tom watched the two of them; watched the potatoes weighed
and the sprig of mint thrown into the scale; watched a huge
dapple-grey cart-horse go by, dragging its cartload of bricks, with
its snuff-coloured driver sitting on a sack on top. And then Alice
had come back into the little parlour again, and he was telling her
all about the birds and the pool.

'Lor now, that _was_ queer, Master Tom,' said Alice. 'And where might
you have been that morning?'

And Tom told her he had been to the churchyard.

'Now you know, my dear soul,' she said in a hushed voice as if
somebody might be listening; 'you know you didn't ought to go there
too often. It isn't good for you. You think too much already. And Joe
says--and you wouldn't believe how happy I am, Master Tom, living here
in this little shop, though I never never forget the old Parsonage and
the kindness of your dear mother--but Joe he says that one didn't
ought to keep on thinking about such things. Not keep on, he means.
How would the world go round, he says, if we was all of us up in the
clouds all day. It looks to me as if you were more a bag of bones than
ever, though p'raps you have been growing--sprouting up a good deal.'

'But wasn't it funny about the birds?' said Tom.

'Why,' said Alice, 'what was funny?'

'Why,' said Tom, 'they weren't just ordinary birds. I am not sure now
they were even quite live birds--real birds I mean, though they might
have come from the sea. And why didn't they fly away when I got near?
They saw me right enough. And why, do you think, do I keep on thinking
about them?'

'Lor bless me!' said Alice. 'The questions he asks! And all them whys!
You ain't much changed at that, Master Tom.'

'Yes, but why?' Tom persisted, spoon in hand, looking up at her over
his saucer of strawberries and cream.

Alice stood on the other side of the table, resting the knuckles of
one hand upon it, and as she looked out across the shop a vacancy came
into her blue eyes, just as if, like Tom himself, she too at times
fell into daydreams. 'Well, I suppose--I suppose,' she said at last in
a low far-away voice, 'you keep on thinking about them because you
can't get them out of your head.'

'Oh that's all right,' said Tom a little impatiently; 'but what I want
to know is why they stay there?'

'Well,' said Alice, 'some things do. I can see those birds meself. And
of course they were real, Master Tom. Of course they were real. Or
else'--she gave a little gentle laugh--' or else, why you and me would
be just talking about ghost birds. What I mean is that it doesn't
follow even if they _was_ real that they didn't mean something else
too. I don't mean exactly that such things do mean anything else, but
only, so to speak, it _seems_ that they do. All depends, I suppose, in
a manner of speaking, on what they are to us, Master Tom. Bless me,
when I stand here in this shop sometimes, looking out at the people in
the street and seeing customers come in--even serving them, too--I
sometimes wonder if the whole _thing_ mayn't mean something else. How
was I to know that I was ever going to get married to my Joe and keep
a greengrocer's shop too? And yet, believe _me_, Master Tom, it seems
just as ordinary and natural now as if I had been meant to do it from
my very cradle.'

Tom looked at her curiously. 'Then what do you think the birds
_mean_?' he repeated.

The soft lids with their light lashes closed down a little further
over her blue eyes as Alice stood pondering over the same old
question. 'Why,' she whispered almost as if she were talking in her
sleep, 'if you ask me, it means that you are going to travel. That's
what _I_ think the birds mean. But then I couldn't say where.'

And suddenly she came back again, as it were--came out of her
momentary reverie or daydream, and looked sharply round at him as if
he might be in danger of something. She was frowning, as though she
were frightened. 'You know, Master Tom,' she went on in a solemn
voice, 'I can never never forgive myself for that poor arm of yours.
Why you might by now... But there! life _is_ a mystery, isn't it? I
suppose in a sort of a way--though Joe would say we oughtn't to brood
on it--life itself is a kind of a journey. That goes on too.'

'Goes on where?' said Tom.

'Ah, that we can't rightly say,' said Alice, smiling at him. 'But I
expect if them birds of yours could find their way from over the sea,
there is no particular reason why human beings should not find
theirs.'

'You mean Emily found hers?' said Tom.

Alice nodded two or three times. 'That I do,' she said.

'Well, all I can say is,' said Tom, 'I wish they'd come back, and the
water too. They were more--more--well, I don't know _what_, than
anything I have ever seen in the whole of my life.'

'And that's a tidy-sized one too!' said Alice, smiling at him again.
And they exchanged a long still look.

And what she had said about his travelling came perfectly true. Quite
early in his twenties Tom had pushed on up the gangway and into the
bowels of the ship that was to take him across the sea to that
far-away country from which he was never to come back. And though
green peas and mint and the last of the cherries may not be quite such
magical things in the memory as the sight of two strange sea-birds
disporting themselves in a pool of rainwater on a bleak silvery March
morning far from their natural haunts, these too when they came round
each year always reminded Alice of that talk with Tom. Indeed she
loved him very dearly, for Tom was of course--and especially after his
accident--a kind of foster son. And when she heard of his going abroad
she remembered the birds as well.


[End of _Visitors_ by Walter de la Mare]