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particular part of his body. It was as if he had dropped from a roof,
but the thud was grateful to him.
It seemed that instantly the beach was populated with men with
blankets, clothes, and flasks, and women with coffee-pots and all
the remedies sacred to their minds. The welcome of the land to the
men from the sea was warm and generous; but a still and dripping
shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for
it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave.
When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the
moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice
to the men on the shore, and they felt that they could then be inter-
preters.
WALTER DE LA MARE • 1 8 7 3 - 1 9 5 6
An Ideal Craftsman
Away into secrecy frisked a pampered mouse. A scuffling of bed-
clothes, the squeak of a dry castor followed, and then suddenly the
boy sat up and set to piecing together reality with scraps of terri-
fying but half-forgotten dreams.
It was his ears had summoned him, they were still ringing with
an obscure message, a faint
Qui vive?
But as he sat blinking and
listening in the empty dark he could not satisfy himself what sound
it was that had actually wakened him. Was it only a dying howl
from out of one of his usual nightmares, or had some actual noise
or cry sounded up from the vacancy of the house beneath? It was
this uncertainty — as if his brain were a piece of mechanism wound
up by sleep — that set working a vivid panorama of memories in
the little theatre of his mind — cloaked men huddled together in
some dark corner of the night, scoundrels plotting in the wind, the
pause between rifle-click and the loose fall, finally to culminate in
the adventure of glorious memory - raiding Jacobs.
He groped under his pillow for the treasures he had concealed
there before blowing out his candle — a box of matches, a crum-
bling slice of pie-crust, and a dingy volume of the
Newgate Calen-
dar.
This last usually lay behind the draughty chimney of his fire-
place, because Jacobs had the habits of a ferret and nothing was
safe from his nosings. He struck a match soundlessly on the edge
of his mattress. Its flare lit up his lank-haired head, his sharp face
and dazzled eyes. Then the flame drooped, went out. But he had
had time to find the broad glossy belt he had cut out of a strip of
mottled American cloth and the old sheathed poniard which he had
months ago abstracted from his father's study. He buckled on the
belt round his body in the dark over his nightshirt and dangled the
rusty blood- or water-stained poniard coldly on his hip. He pulled
on his stockings, tilted an old yachting cap over his eyes, and
was fully equipped.
In this feverish haste he had had little time to ponder strategy.
An Ideal Craftsman
203
But now he sat down again on the edge of his bed, and though he
was pretending to think, his brows wrinkled in a frown, he was
actually listening. Even the stairs had ceased to creak. And the star
that from a wraith of cloud glittered coldly in the night sky beyond
the rift between his curtains made no sound. He drew open his
door, inch by inch, still intent, then stepped out on to the landing.
The first danger to be encountered on the staircase below was his
father's bedroom. Its door gaped half open, but was it empty? It
was here on this very spot, he remembered with a qualm, that
Jacobs had once leapt out on him. He saw in memory that agile
shape stepping hastily and oddly in the dusk, furious at sight of the
eavesdropper. And in an instant the tiny blue bead of gas on the
landing had expanded into a white fan-shaped glare. Not so to-
night. With a gasp and an oblique glance at the dusky bed and the
spectral pendent clothes within, he slid by in safety on his stockinged
feet, and so past yet another door - but this one tight shut, with
its flower-painted panels — the door of his mother's gay little sitting-
room, his real mother's, not the powdery eyebrowed stepmother
who a few hours before had set out with his father, on pleasure
bent.
A few paces beyond he trod even more cautiously, for here was
a loose board. At the last loop of the staircase Jacobs' customary
humming should issue up out of the gloom beneath — the faint tune
which he rasped on and on and on, faint and shrill between his
teeth, superciliously, ironically, in greasy good humour or sly
facetiousness — he would hum it in his coffin perhaps. But no,
not a sound. The raider hesitated. What next? Where now? He
listened in vain.
And then, he suddenly remembered that this was 'silver' night.
And doubtless — cook and housemaid long since snoring in their
attic — a white glittering array of forks and spoons, soup ladles,
and candlesticks were at this very moment spread out in bedaubed
splendour before the aproned tyrant. For Jacobs was not only
queer in his habits and nocturnal by nature but a glutton for work.
But if it was silver night, why this prodigious hush? No clang of
fork ringing against its neighbour; not a single rattle of whitening
brush on metal reached his ears.
Slim as a ferret himself, he hung over the loop in the staircase as
he might have hung over the Valley of Death; but still all was
strangely quiet. And so, with a pang of disappointment, and at the
204
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