'It Was a Mild, Clammy Evening . . .'

The marvelously named Edmund Arnold Greening Lamborn (1877-1950) is yet another writer whose existence I never suspected until I stumbled upon a book he edited in 1928: Present-Day Prose. If the title and year of publication suggest Joyce and Eliot, forget it. Though he does include William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among the Modernists, Lamborn’s anthology is largely retrospective. Typical of the titles of his own books are The Story of Architecture in Oxford Stone (1912) and Towns and Town-Planning, Ancient & Modern (1923). He was on the margins of the English literary world and in Who’s Who in Oxfordshire (1936) claimed to be “educated by Books, Buildings and the Companionship of Wild Animals.” In the anthology he includes pieces by Beerbohm, Conrad and Chesterton, along with a dozen writers unknown to me. 

The gem is “The Automatic Machine” by Walter de la Mare, a short story I had never read. It’s less than three pages long and barely qualifies as an anecdote. What impresses me is the brevity and near-plotlessness of the story, coupled with de la Mare’s gift for suggesting something mysterious without making it explicit. In his poetry and fiction he’s a master of mood-setting and subtle, almost nonexistent menace. The narrator enters a taproom where two other patrons are already seated:

 

“It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the taproom stood wide open,” the story begins. “The brass-oil lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit. A small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the overarching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.”

 

The other patrons are “a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person 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.”

 

In the corner is an “automatic machine.” De la Mare is never explicit but the machine seems to combine elements of an anachronistic videogame and a peepshow. “It was a machine of an unusual kind,” he writes, “since it gave its patronisers nothing tangible for their penny—not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.”

You insert a penny and one of two figures appears: if you lose, “a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl”; if you win, “a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin” who “danced a brief but impassioned pas seul.” The enticement seems sexual, though de la Mare withholds anything so blunt.

 

“[I]f the nymph responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot—but before you could count ten. This galvanised the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood—a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.”

 

With minimal means and beautiful prose, de la Mare creates a dream-like memory that will last. Very traditional storytelling and vivid prose, stripped to the essentials.