Walter De la Mare

“ Besides, he was years and years older than I. I told him that I was a schoolmaster, on vacation; not thinking it necessary to add that, owing to a small legacy, I was out of a job at the time. I said I was 'enjoying myself.'
"'Enjoying yourself! And you teach!' he cried with a snap of his jaw. 'And what do you teach? Silly, suffocating lies, I suppose; or facts; as you prefer to call them.' He drew his hand down his long colorless face, and I stole a glance towards the door. 'If human beings are mere machines, well and good,' he went on. ”

“ Kempe had been something of a pioneer in this inquest. He had not spared himself. He could not live by faith, it seemed. He must indeed again and again have come uncommonly near dying in pursuit of it. He had fasted moreover, and was now little more than a mere frame of bones within his outlandish clothes. Those boots of his—they kept forcing themselves on the attention: a worse fit than any worn by some poor desperate Tommy clambering 'over the top' in the Great War. ”

“ Kempe—a young man who, whether or not possessed with a soul, was at least fairly capable in body. Surely I might have ventured. ... Life has more riddles than one. ... But I did not pursue these thoughts far. The very look and appearance of the house as I glanced up at the window out of which I had descended so abruptly, its overhanging gable, its piebald darkened walls rising towards the first stars, under the last of twilight—it was hardly less unhappy and unpleasing company than its tenant. ”

“ Now and again indeed the fallen bole of a tree or matted clumps of bramble, briony, and traveler's joy compelled me to make a widish detour. But I was still steadily ascending, and the view tended at length to become more and more open; with here and there a patch of bright green turf and a few scrub bushes of juniper or sprouting tamarisk. Even at this point it would have been flattery to call the track a path. The steeper its incline the more stony and precarious became one's footing. ”

“ Kempe rational, within bounds. To make a monster of him would be merely to lose my head once more as I had already lost it on his sea-cliff heights. None the less, I was now looking at him through the after image of those chance-seen photographs. They were a distorting medium. The body of a human being who has fallen from a great height is not pleasing and pacifying to look at even though for a while its owner may have survived the fatality. ”

“ Excluding the landlady, who occasionally waddled in from her dusky retreat behind the bar, there were only three chance customers in the tap-room, now met together for the first time: myself; a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkeylike in his face; and a barrel-shaped creature who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose. ”

“ And neither the natives of the village nor even chance visitors, it seemed, were tempted to make much use of this particular route."
"Why not?" inquired the man in leggings and immediately coughed as if he had thought better of it.
"That's what I am coming to," replied the schoolmaster as though he had been lying in wait for the question. "You see my old lady had volunteered her last piece of information with a queerish look in her eyes—like some shy animal slipping into cover. She was telling me the truth, but not, I fancied, the whole truth. ”

“ Still, I was myself as nervous as a cat. With all his oddities—those wide colorless eyes, those gestures, that overloud voice—there was nothing hostile, nothing even discourteous in his manner, and he did not appear to be warning me off as a trespasser. Indeed, the finger wagging at me in the air was clearly beckoning me on. Not that I had any keen inclination to follow. I preferred to go on watching him and attempted to mark time by once more referring to the age and architecture of the chapel; asked him at last pointblank if it was now too late to beg the courtesy of a glimpse inside. ”

“ Besides, myriads of concealed eyes in the dense forest towering conically up on the other side of the narrow bay beneath me, and looming ever more mistily from headland to headland towards the north and west, could have watched my every movement. A thousand arrows from unseen archers concealed on the opposing heights might at any instant have transfixed me where I lay. One becomes conscious, too, of the sort of empty settled stare which fixes an intruder into such solitudes. ”

“ I was a younger man then, and could still in the long run rely on nerve and muscle; but fear turns one's blood to water—that terror of the spirit, and not merely of the mind or instinct. It bides its moment until the natural edges off into—into the unknown. ”

“ The old gray tousled head turned not an inch upon its heavy angular shoulders as he passed me; but in the dimming light of the window I caught a glimpse of the wide, sealike eyes intently fixed on me—for all the world like lifeless planets in the waste of space.
"Even a young man may have intimations of the fool he is about to prove himself. ”

“ Both delusions and illusions, too, are rapid breeders. Which of the two, I wondered—still wonder—was this old man's conviction,—the conviction, I mean, that one is likely to be more conscious of the spirit within when the body is suspended, as it were, from the lintel of Death's door. ”

“ He had motioned me to a chair, and had seated himself on another that was already topped with two or three folios. It must have been even at midday an obscure room; and owing to its situation it was a dark house. The door having admitted us, stood open; beyond it yawned the silent staircase."
At this the schoolmaster paused; the landlady of the "Blue Boar" had once more emerged and, like one man, we shamefacedly pushed our three glasses across the counter. ”

“ One at least knows oneself to be something objective in any chance-encountered pair of human eyes. In his, as I have said already, I appeared to have no material existence whatever. Mr. Kempe might have been surveying, talking to, his own shadow. It was peculiarly disconcerting.
"After yet another such outburst he had for a moment lain back in his chair as if exhausted. And I was so intent in my scrutiny of him that a second or two went by before I sprang forward to pick up the few dingy photographs that had fallen out of his hand on to the grimy patch of carpet beneath. ”

“ Yet whatever curiosity might say for itself, I felt a peculiar disinclination to forge ahead. The bait had ceased to be enticing.
"I paused once more under the dismal funnel of greenery in which I found myself, staring at the face of my watch, and then had another look at the map. A minute or two's scrutiny assured me that straight ahead was my only possible course. And why not? There was company ahead. In this damp soil the impressions of the hobnailed shoes showed more clearly. Quite recently those shoes must have come and gone along this path on three separate occasions at least ”

“ Kempe?"
"The soul?"
"Yes," I echoed, "the soul." But I repeated the term under my breath, for something in the sound of our voices seemed to have attracted the attention of the landlady. And, alas, she had decided to light up.
The solemnity of Man's remotest ancestors lay over the schoolmaster's features. "I can't say," he replied. "I am uncertain even if he was aware how densely populated his valley had appeared to be—to a chance visitor I mean. What's more, to judge from the tones of his voice, he had scarcely the effect of a single personality, There were at least three Mr. ”