Walter De la Mare

“ The fruit merchant stood under the shed in his frieze coat and square hard hat and watched the train glide out of the station. The screech of its engine, horning up into the windless air, had exactly expressed his own peculiar sentiments.
There was not a living being in sight whereon to breathe a curse. Only himself, a self he had been vaguely cursing throughout his tedious journey. The frozen landscape lay white in the dying day. The sun hung like the yolk of an egg above the still horizon. ”

“ The horse was dragged up on to its haunches, the cab came to a standstill, and, to the roaring suspirations of the animal, the fruit merchant alighted on the tinkling ice of a frozen wayside puddle of water. He turned himself about. Time and the night had not tarried during his journey. The east was a blaze of moonlight. The moon glared in the gray heavens like a circular flat little window of glass. ”

“ And at that moment, as if an angry and helpless thought could make itself audible even above the hungry racketing of mice and the melancholic whistling of a paraffin-lamp—at that moment the corpse-like countenance, almost within finger-touch on the other side of the table, slowly raised itself from the labor of its regard, and appeared to be searching through the shutter's cranny as if into the fruit merchant's brain. ”

“ The mere fact was, their last quarrel, if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel, had tinctured the fruit merchant's outlook on the world a good deal more densely than he would until now have confessed.
No living creature, no sound stirred the air. The fair country lay cold as if in a swoon. Like a shallow inverted saucer a becalmed sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the fields. ”

“ Give him a taste of the sweets of success, and his boasted solitude, his contempt for the mere decencies of life, his pretended disgust at men more capable and square-headed than himself had vanished into thin air. There were fools in the world, he had now discovered, who would pay ninety-seven guineas for a second or third hand scrabble of a drawing. “Right you are; hand over the dibs, and I am off!”
A scornful yet lugubrious smile stole over the fruit merchant's purplish features. He would be honest about it; he positively enjoyed acknowledging when a rival had bested him over a bargain. ”

“ But small beetles or grubs or single feathers drawn “from the life” were within scope of the fruit merchant's purse. The eye that showed not the faintest vestige of reflected glory from the orange of the orange, the gamboge of the lemon, or the russet bronze of the pomegranate in their crated myriads would fitfully light up awhile as one by one, and with reiterated grunts of satisfaction, he afterward, in the secrecy of his home consigned these indifferent and “early” works of art to the flames. ”

“ A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night.
He was elderly, he was obese, his heart was none too sound, at least as compared with his head. Yet if he intended to catch the last train home, he had scarcely a couple of hours in which to reach his half-brother's wretched little house, to congratulate him on his guineas, to refuse to accept repayment of his loan, to sneer at his tree, and to return to the station. ”

“ The wandering greenish-gray eyes had rested for a moment on the puffy contemptuous face a few inches beneath them without the faintest symptom of intelligence. Empty eyes, yet with a hint of danger in them, like a bright-green pool of water in a derelict quarry.
“You shall have a basket of the fruit; if you'll risk it. It never really ripens; queer-looking seeds.” ”

“ Every sight of them had made it easier for the fruit merchant to work himself up into a blind refreshing rage. The cottage had fairly shaken to his abuse; the raw onions had danced under his fist on the table. And twining in and out between his roarings and shoutings had meandered on that other low, groping, dispassionate voice—his brother's. He had found his own place; and there he intended to remain. Rather than sit on a stool in a counting-house writing invoices for crates of oranges and pineapples he would hang himself from the topmost branches of the tree. ”

“ Green living buds are everywhere huddling close in their drowsy defenses. Even the fruit merchant could distinguish between the dreaming and the dead, or, at any rate, between the unripe and the rotten. And as he looked, two thoughts scurried like rats out of the wainscot of his mind. These lean shrunken twigs, these massive vegetable bones—the tree was dead! And up there— He shifted rapidly to and fro in order to secure an uninterrupted view of a kind of huddling shape up aloft there, an object that appeared to be stooping crazily forward as if on a similar quest in respect to himself. ”

“ One corpse at a time was enough for any man on a night like this and in a country as cheerless as the plains of Gomorrah. A phrase or two out of his familiar bills of lading recurred to the fruit merchant's mind—“the act of God.” There was something so horrific in the contorted set of the branches outthrust in ungainly menace above his head that he was reminded of no less a depravity than the devil himself. ”

“ And even the most trifling suggestion, not so much of eccentricity as of an alien and crooked gleam in the eye, is apt to make the most respectable company a little uneasy.
Not that the two half-brothers had ever discussed together their aims and intentions and ideas about life; their desires or motives or hopes, or aversions or apprehensions or prejudices. The fruit merchant had his fair share of most of these human incentives, but he also had principles, and one of them was to keep his mouth shut. ”

“ With a gesture of disdain the fruit merchant sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy porter's immense-knuckled hand and mounted into the ancient cab that had somehow been excavated from the country-side stagnating all about them. Even the man on the box resembled some little cautious and obscure animal that had been dug up out of the earth. ”

“ That's what came of idling a useless life away in a day-dream at other people's expense. And now the cunning bird was flown. The insult of his half-brother's triumph stabbed the fruit merchant like a sword. ”

“ A railway-carriage even of the most antique description, when its glass is opaque with rime, is a little less like a prison-cell than a four-wheeled cab. For which reason, perhaps, as the vehicle ground on beneath the misty leafless elms, the frigid air was allowed to beat softly in from the open window upon its occupant's slightly impurpled face. ”

“ If his half-brother had taken the fruit merchant into a dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an ailing plant that with care, water, and guano had been raised from some far-fetched seed—well, that might have been something to boast about. He himself was in the trade. He knew a Jaffa orange from a mandarin. The stuff has to grow, of course; and he was broad-minded enough to approve of rural enterprise. ”

“ There's no claim on me, not a shred. We don't even share the same mother, even if we share the same dad. You talk this abject rubbish to me. You have never earned a decent penny in your life. You never will. You are a fool and a loafer. ”

“ In shadows black as pitch, like these, any inconceivably evil creature might be in covert. If the tree alive could decoy an alien fauna to its succulent nectar, the tree dead might well invite even less pleasing ministrations. ”

“ Little birds, with unusually long and attenuated bills, playing, fluttering, lisping, courting, and apparently sucking the heady nectar from the snowy and ivory cups, while poised like animate gems on the wing. ”

“ The fruit merchant stole in a pace or two. No feat of the inhuman this. Cleanly and precisely the thick rind of the tree must some time since have been cut and pared away in a wide equal ring; a ring too far from the ground to have been the work of pigs or goats, too smooth and sharp-edged to have been caused by the gnawings of cattle. ”