Blackwood and More

THE CHAMOIS by Daphne du Maurier

“All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw – not only the non-appearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for my self a ledge of safety.“

…and that ‘bridge’ between these two Sibelius lovers eventually became a dangerous gap in the Northern wilds of Greece between them, across which the woman narrator tries to rescue her bumptious husband who had by now become like a scared deer in the headlights of a car.
The husband, with an already well-stocked trophy room, is obsessed with hunting the inscrutably rare chamois about which animal I here learnt a lot. And the goatherd guide called Jesus, so similar to the Menace of Barry with the latter’s lack of emotions and staged inscrutability, yet the goatherd is so different, so unstaged? The description of Jesus’ eyes is unsurpassable. And he is shot by mistake by her husband, if that is not a spoiler the nature of which has now shot the reader! But not a mistake at all? Willed by the narrator when mis-storifying us about it? This is a classic story, no mistake. Another Algernon Blackwood weird tale of deserved note, with something Maurier more. A car’s “chassis” (in assonance with ‘chamois’) steered by a wall-eyed driver that takes them along lethal hairpin bends over chasms towards the perhaps too rare chamois, and the husband, having taken a cloth from his pouch, meaningfully polishes his rifle at the end before he aims and fires it, as if this story in 1959 knew what chamois leather cloths were used for! And perhaps it did. And ‘pork-ham’ to echo Barry’s spam. A cupboard to sleep in. Giddiness and fear outside. Unmissable.

“, it was as though our last link with sanity had snapped.”

FULL REVIEW OF ‘THE BREAKING POINT’ COLLECTION: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/the-breaking-point-stories-by-daphne-du-maurier/